Kris Brown:
No.
It's a failure of democracy. What we're hearing here is manifestly against what every poll tells us the American people want; 93 percent of Americans want expanded background checks. Why is that? Because they know that background checks save lives. We have stopped more than four million, through the Brady law, four million sales of guns to prohibited purchasers.
But, today, one in five guns is sold with no background check at all. Why is that? Over the Internet and at gun shows, these guns can be sold with no background check by private sellers, because when Jim and Sarah Brady passed the law, there was no Internet, and there were no gun shows.
And there are so many other things that we can do. President Biden has talked about some of them. For those who say, we can't do anything, let's look at the kinds of things that they're actually doing in Congress and in state legislatures to reverse, to back-roll the kinds of public safety that are important to us.
Just today, Congress was supposed to have a hearing in the House about certain kinds of devices that can be added to assault-style weapons to make them more deadly. They canceled that hearing. Why? Because of this shooting, because there are certain reports that indicate that the shooter used those kinds of devices. Brace stabilizers is what they're called.
Obviously, people like him who talk about, we can't do anything, they're the ones who are trying to roll back protections. And I have to say the issue that we as Americans should really internalize is, do we want a version of the Second Amendment that is a death sentence to our fellow Americans?
Are we going to make this a key political issue, or won't we? Because we have to hold people like that lawmaker and others to account. They have blood on their hands. I can't vote. I wish I could. I can't vote in Congress, but I can vote at the ballot box. And every time I do, I make gun violence prevention a priority.
And that's what we must do if we want to change the trajectory of our country. This is a national shame. We cannot say we live in a country, the land of the free, the home of the brave, when our kids are dying at school and when gun violence is the number one killer of our children, surpassing automobile fatalities.
We have to make a difference, and we can. We can. And we should. We're Americans.
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