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[Page: H3746] GPO's PDF---
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. GREEN of Wisconsin). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DELAURO) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
THE WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON MENTAL HEALTH
Ms. DELAURO. Mr. Speaker, before we begin our commentary this evening, I want to congratulate my colleague, the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. JACKSON-LEE) and my colleague from California who spoke earlier about the White House Conference on Mental Health .
I had the honor to participate in that event as well today, and just very, very quickly, I think it is clear that we need to focus on the issue of mental health . It is so critical in our society.
One, we cannot divorce the head from the rest of the body. We need to have the recognition that mental illness is an illness like other physical illnesses that people have. We need to destigmatize it.
We need to provide, most essentially, insurance coverage in the same way that we provide insurance coverage for physical illnesses. There needs to be parity for mental illnesses. We should consider that good mental health is good public health , and we need to promote that effort. So I compliment my colleague on her comments.
Mr. Speaker, this evening I am pleased to join with other colleagues, because we recognize that this is an important week for this Congress. Two weeks ago the United States Senate did the right thing. It is now time for the House of Representatives to do the right thing. That is to pass gun safety legislation for children in our country.
Thirteen children every single day are killed by guns in America. By comparison, there was an interesting statistic, that we lose one police officer every other day. That means it is more dangerous to be a child in America than it is to be a law enforcement officer. That is wrong. We need to pass commonsense gun safety laws in order to protect the children in this country.
Democrats in this body are a minority. We need votes from Republicans, from the other side of the aisle, to pass any piece of legislation. I believe that 85 percent of the Democrats in this body will vote for commonsense gun safety legislation to protect our youngsters. We need 20 percent of our Republican colleagues in the House to say no to their leadership and to join us to try to do the right thing.
We can in fact pass strong bipartisan gun safety legislation for children in this body. That has been the historical past. In 1995 with the Brady Bill, with an assault weapons ban, these pieces of legislation happened because thoughtful, reflective people came together on both sides of the aisle to say that this makes sense for our country. We have the opportunity to do that again this week. I happen to believe that American families and American children are counting on us to do our jobs.
What we have seen in the last couple of weeks, there were a number of us who wanted to try to pass this legislation before we left for the Memorial Day break, but we were told that we needed to come back to have hearings, that there needed to be a more thoughtful approach to how we dealt with this.
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What has happened in the interim, and I think it is important to note this, unfortunately, the National Rifle Association, they asked for this delay and they received a two-week delay from the Republican leadership in this House.
That was designed to give the NRA time to generate a campaign of fear in an attempt to influence this vote, to water down the provisions that were passed by the United States Senate around which there was agreement that these were good pieces that everyone could agree to.
The NRA has generated that campaign of fear. That is what they have been doing. I just want to read briefly from a letter that was sent out over the weekend from the NRA. It is an astounding example of big money propaganda, but it has little relationship to the truth.
If I can just read one or two excerpts, and I quote, ``What the Clinton-Gore-Lautenberg-Schumer legislation would do is to impose a cradle-to-grave massive Federal regulatory scheme on gun owners throughout America, and that is no exaggeration.''
The second item, this legislation, ``It gives the Federal Government open-ended authority to issue phone-book sized volumes of new Federal red tape on Americans who buy and sell firearms. It gives the Federal Government authority to keep names and addresses of citizens in FBI files, even after they are cleared as honest people entitled to buy firearms. It imposes virtually unlimited Federal fees across the board, whether you are selling guns, buying guns, or organizing or attending a gun show.''
The final item, again I quote, ``None of this has a thing to do with the Littleton or Georgia school attacks or any violent crime anywhere in America. It has everything to do with an attempt by gun haters and the enemies of your Second Amendment freedoms to dismantle the Second Amendment, one step at a time.''
That they could comment to say that the Nation has not focused its mind, hearts, and energy on what happened in Littleton, Colorado, or in Conyers, Georgia, this is mind-boggling. They say it has nothing to do with this event. It has nothing to do with Georgia?
I say, I do not understand where these people come from. This has everything to do with Littleton, Colorado, and with Conyers, Georgia. This has everything to do with parents who today are afraid to send their children to schools. They are afraid of utilizing what has been the route to opportunity and success in this country, the classroom, the schoolroom.
I heard a fifth-grader last night in Orange, Connecticut, say that schools used to be the safest place to be. She, this little mite of a person, was reading her little statement at a town meeting, and she said, ``I have had to ask myself and ask my classmates whether or not this could happen in my school. And I have to answer that yes. And it makes me sad and it
makes me afraid.''
All we are asking for in this body, again, on this side of the aisle, is let us pay attention to the hue and cry of the American public in asking us to try to do something to bring some sense out of fear and some sense out of chaos. Parents and teachers are pleading with us to respond. We are in the midst of a national crisis.
Frankly, in my view there is no need for this kind of propaganda where the safety of our kids is concerned. We do not need to be engaged in hyperbole. We need to be very careful about this issue. We need to be very thoughtful and reflective about this issue.
Our message to the NRA is that this is the people's House. This is not their House. The American people desperately want to see gun safety legislation for their children, and those of us who are charged with the responsibility of bringing their voices to this people's House have an obligation to try to do the will of the public. We should heed their voices this week.
I am optimistic that we will pass good gun safety legislation, because while the NRA was generating this campaign over the last few weeks, there was another campaign that was going on in this country, a campaign by moms and dads, and teachers and grandparents, a grass roots campaign in America, people writing, calling, and having town meetings like the one that I went to last night on a beautiful Sunday evening in Connecticut, in Orange, Connecticut; 200 people willing to sit for almost 3 hours to express their views on how we try to deal with youth violence in this country.
Everywhere that I go these days people come up and they ask me, what is Congress doing to try to address this issue of gun violence? I went to a meeting where I was talking about social security and Medicare, and a woman stopped me as I was leaving. She grabbed my arm and she said to me, Rosa, she says, you are going back to Congress next week. Is there anything that is going to be done about the violence? She says, can you do something about gun legislation?
She says, I have two grandchildren. Both of them were forced to leave school 2 weeks ago because they had to be evacuated out of school in Indiana. She lives in Connecticut, her grandchildren are in Indiana, scared to death because these kids had to be evacuated from their classroom because of the fear that is out there.
I remember reading a story in the wake of the Littleton shooting where a Colorado parent said that his 5-year-old asked him, and I quote, ``Dad, are they just shooting the big kids, or are they shooting the little kids, too?'' Do we want to live in a country where 5-year-olds fear for their lives? Our 5-year-olds should be learning the ABCs. They should be playing outside at recess. They should not be worrying about gun violence.
I view this week as a test for this institution as to whether or not we have the courage to act. We have a chance to make such a difference in peoples' lives, to do the right thing, to allay some of those fears of parents, to begin to make a difference in keeping guns out of the hands of young people. But it must be a real deal, commonsense gun safety legislation, not watered-down legislation that is filled with loopholes.
We could make some very small changes in our laws that could make a big difference in people's lives: Close the gun show loophole and apply the Brady background checks at gun shows, require child safety locks to be sold with every gun, raise the eligibility age for owning a firearm from 18 to 21, and ban the sale of high capacity ammunition clips.
The issue of youth violence is not an easy one, it is a complex one. We need to have parents take greater responsibility for their children. We need the entertainment industry to take responsibility for its products. We need to ensure that our children have access to the mental health care that they need, that we talked about today at this conference.
But we must also curb our children's access to guns. We should pass this commonsense gun safety legislation this week. The American people I believe are depending on us.
Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. MCCARTHY) is someone who is truly a leader in this House of Representatives on this issue, someone for whom we have in this body, all of us, a tremendous amount of admiration; a woman who has demonstrated such unbelievable courage in the face of tragedy in her own life, who has taken on this issue of gun safety, and taken her own personal experience and turned it in a way to drive energy and vision and inspiration to trying to bring some sense to this issue of gun safety.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. CAROLYN MCCARTHY).
Mrs. McCARTHY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me.
Mr. Speaker, my good colleague, the gentlewoman from Connecticut, mentioned that I came here to Congress to try and make a difference in people's lives. Six years ago I used to work in my garden a lot. I worked as a nurse. My husband and I used to go skiing in the winter, and my son was starting a new job. Then, on December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, an incident happened on Long Island which certainly affected my life and many lives on Long Island.
[Time: 19:45]
That day I lost my husband. That day my son almost died, and my world became upside down.
It is almost 6 years now, and I take this issue of gun safety very, very personally because, as my son started to
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As a nurse, I have always looked at things as holistic. I have always looked at things as common sense. I said, well, obviously we have just got to tell the story, obviously we have just got to reach out to the American people and say, listen, we can make a difference out here. We can save people's lives. Never once did I ever think of taking away the right of someone to own a gun that never came into my mind.
But there was more that we could do to make sure that criminals did not get their guns. There was more that we could do so that children did not accidently find a gun and use it. There was more that we could do to save families from going through the pain that we all did.
Then in 1996, my Representative decided to vote to repeal the assault weapons bill. But what people did not realize is how hard I fought to make sure that large capacity clips could not be used in this country. People said, well, that would not have made any difference in the Long Island railroad shooting. It would not have helped my husband, and it would not have helped my son, and it would not have helped the people in the beginning of the car.
But I would have to say it would have helped three young people on the other end of the car because Colin Ferguson used a clip that had 15 bullets in it. He was able to get two clips off before courageous people were able to tackle him. With the assault weapons bill, we brought that down to 10 bullets a clip.
I will be very honest with my colleagues, I did not know enough about guns, I did not know enough about what was going on out there. But one of the things I did find out from asking my hunters, ``Do you use these large capacity clips? Do you use these to go hunting?'' They said ``Oh, absolutely not. You are not allowed to. You have to be a sportsman.'' I said, ``Well let me get this right. Large capacity clips, people can buy them up to 15, 30, sometimes 60, sometimes 90 clips in one round, but we will give the animals in the forest, we will give the birds a better chance than a human being.''
I could not understand that. Why did we have to fight so hard to get it down to 10 clips? Colin Ferguson did not miss one person with the bullets that he used. If we had had that law passed then, maybe three young people on the other end of the train would have survived. We do not know. Because the good news is, once the law was passed, we do not have a count on how many people were saved because we do not have a statistic anymore.
But I remember that debate back then, because I was part of it. I remember the NRA leadership at that time saying this is the slippery road. We are going to take away the right of everyone to own a gun. That has not happened. That was back in 1994. Now here we are in 1999. We have had eight shootings in our schools. We have lost too many children and too many were wounded.
We should be focusing on so many different issues. The gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. JACKSON-LEE) talked about mental health . As a nurse, I can tell my colleagues that is something that we have to work with especially in our schools. Our children seem to be under so much pressure today. We have a lot of things that we can work on together, working with the parents, working with the schools, working with our community police to try and stop these tragedies. But people are forgetting because they do not make the newspapers. When we lose 13 young people a day, that is a Littleton every single day. We cannot lose focus on that.
But one of the things that upsets me, again, the NRA leadership. I keep saying the word ``leadership'' for a reason, because I have a lot of NRA members in my district. I talked to them, and I said, ``This is what we are trying to do. Do you see anything wrong with this? Is there anything wrong with a child safety lock?'' They said, ``CAROLYN, we already store our guns correctly. We take those precautions.'' Do my colleagues know what, almost every hunter does.
We are not concerned about those that actually know how to store their guns, but we have so many people today that just go out and buy a gun, do not learn how to use it, bring it home, and leave it in the home. That is inviting disaster. That is inviting disaster.
What we are trying to do is modest, and they will say, the NRA leadership, that it is not going to save anyone's life. I have heard this debate for so long, and, yet, when I look at other countries, other countries that do not have the killings like we do, they have the same social problems as we do, they have drug problems, they have alcohol problems, they have mental health problems, and yet they are not losing over 30,000 people a year or they are not losing over 5,000 children under the age of 18 every single year.
There is something wrong here. All I am asking is for this House to put forward what the Senate put forward. All I am asking, let us try to see if we can bring gun violence down in this country. Let us see if we can do this.
As I said, what the Senate has put forward are modest steps. Do I think that we should be able to do more? Yes. Will that debate hopefully come in the future? I hope so. But this week let us see where the House is, because a week ago Thursday, I sat with the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. JACKSON-LEE) on the juvenile justice committee, and I sat there. I am usually a very optimistic person, but by the time we left that committee hearing, I said, oh, my God. We are not going to get anything done. The NRA leadership is going to come into this committee and water down those modest bills that were passed. Child safety locks. Closing the loopholes in our shows, our gun shows.
Yet, if my colleagues listen to the NRA leadership, and unfortunately so many of their members will read this and get scared, they will get scared because they will say they are trying to take away my right to own a gun, there is nothing in the bills that we are trying to be passed, hopefully this week, that will take away the right of a legal citizen, a legal person to buy a gun.
Will there be some inconveniences? Yes, there will be. But do my colleagues know what? Again, talking to gun owners, women gun owners, men gun owners, they are willing to take that inconvenience if it can save a child's life, if it can save someone's life.
We see statistics that gun violence has come down in this country as far as homicides. What no one talks about is what it is costing this health care system, because medical technology, thank God, are saving people. That is not a statistic.
My son is a statistic. He survived. He was not supposed to live. But there is no count on him and what it has cost this country to get him where he is today and the struggles that he has to go through on a daily basis to keep what he has worked so hard to get.
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