[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 111 (Monday, July 11, 2016)]
[House]
[Pages H4577-H4578]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              GUN VIOLENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Maxine Waters) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I take the floor today 
to continue the discussion that we started in this House about gun 
violence.
  Something extraordinary took place here in the House of 
Representatives.

[[Page H4578]]

We had Members on this side of the aisle, Democrats, who came to the 
floor and who sat on the floor in the well of the House. That was 
extraordinary. No one has ever seen this happen before.
  Why did this take place? How is it you can get every group in the 
Democratic Party to basically join in an action that had never taken 
place before?
  What am I talking about?
  I am talking about the Women's Caucus, the Black Caucus, the 
Progressive Caucus. I am talking about New Democrats. I am talking 
about all of those in our Democratic Party who do not always agree with 
each other. We work at it, but we have serious and credible 
disagreements. However, you did not hear any denouncement from any of 
our Democrats about what we were doing.
  Why did we do this, and why did we have basically so much support for 
what we did?
  When I say ``support,'' I am not simply talking about Democrats. I am 
talking about people who left their homes, their businesses, and their 
workplaces and joined us outside. They even stayed for hours in the 
rain to say to us: Thank you for finally giving voice to this problem 
that we have in this country on gun violence.
  The Members of the Democratic Party and those people who were outside 
basically said: We are sick and tired of the influence that is exerted 
by the gun lobby.
  You have the NRA that owns too many Members of Congress and who can 
tell them what to do. There are Members who are intimidated by the gun 
lobby and the NRA. So what they do is they hide behind the Constitution 
and they will tell you that they are defending their constitutional 
rights.
  None of us, in what we sat in about, talked about taking away 
anybody's guns. What we said was we have got to make sure that guns are 
not in the hands of people who should not have them; people who have 
committed crimes; people who have committed murder; people who have 
shown that perhaps something is wrong with them psychologically or 
emotionally. We should not make it easy for these people to have guns.
  What should we do about it?
  We have two very simple bills, and we begged the Speaker of this 
House to allow us to take up those bills, to debate those bills, to 
have them voted up or down.
  Well, the Speaker won't do it. The Speaker won't do it because, as it 
has been described, he, too, is a handmaiden of the gun lobby, along 
with all of the other Members afraid to come and represent and to deal 
with the tough issues that confront us.
  What were those bills all about?
  One is very easy to explain: no fly, no buy.
  What does that mean?
  It simply means that if you are on a list that says you can't get on 
an airplane because you are dangerous, we know something about you that 
will not allow us to allow you to get on an airplane where you may 
commit an action that could endanger the lives of everybody on that 
plane and others even on the ground, no fly, no buy.
  Why should we sell guns to somebody who we have said are too 
dangerous to fly on the airplane?
  That is all we wanted on that bill, was a vote to say: Yeah, that 
makes good sense. If you cannot fly, you should not be able to buy.
  What is wrong with that?
  That is very simple.
  Why can't they take up that bill? Aren't they concerned about who 
gets on the airplane?
  Yes. But if you are concerned about who gets on the airplane, you 
should be concerned about who is able to buy a gun.
  The other bill is just as clear, just as simple: universal background 
checks. We need to know who is buying these guns. Somebody will say: 
Don't we have something about background checks in the law?
  Ladies and gentlemen, we are not covering what is on the Internet. We 
are not covering the fact that these gun shows are selling guns out of 
the back of their cars. They don't know who the people are. They don't 
care who they are, and they walk away with guns, and they go out and 
they kill people with them.

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