Jerrold Nadler

Mr. NADLER

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Beyer).

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time remains on each side?

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Michigan (Mrs. Lawrence).

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield the gentlewoman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Madam Speaker, extreme risk laws save lives, it is that simple. Ultimately, that is what this debate should be about--saving lives. This legislation strikes a proper balance between protecting the due process rights of people in crisis and preventing tragedy by ensuring that those who pose an imminent danger to themselves or others do not have access to firearms. Madam Speaker, this debate has been surreal. Every court that has considered the question has concluded that red flag laws afford proper due process and are constitutional. We already know that extreme risk laws work, but less than half the States have those laws in effect. Madam Speaker, let us pass this legislation today, so we can bring access to this life-savings tool nationwide. We know it is not enough. We know we need all the provisions of the bill we passed yesterday, and we should bring back the assault weapons ban. But what we cannot do should not block us from doing what we can do. We can save thousands of lives annually, so let us begin. Madam Speaker, I urge all Members to support this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1153, I call up the bill (H.R. 7910) to amend title 18, United States Code, to provide for an increased age limit on the purchase of certain firearms, prevent gun trafficking, modernize the prohibition on untraceable firearms, encourage the safe storage of firearms, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material on H.R. 7910.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the distinguished Speaker of the House.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, our Nation has been through trying times these last few weeks as we have tried to process the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and all too many other cities. Just this past weekend, we learned of yet another horrific incident in Philadelphia and yet more carnage in Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, and South Carolina. And those are just the stories we saw in the news. Day after day, we see more lives lost to gun violence in our schools, on our streets, in our houses of worship, and in our homes, touching every region of the country. And we hear the urgent calls from our constituents crying out for us to take action. Today, we heed that call. H.R. 7910, the Protecting Our Kids Act, is comprehensive legislation to address the scourge of gun violence, a blight that killed nearly 45,000 Americans in 2020 alone. It builds on the work of several of our colleagues, including: Anthony Brown's Raise the Age Act, which would raise the lawful age to purchase an AR-15 styled semiautomatic assault rifle from 18 to 21 years old; Robin Kelly's Prevent Gun Trafficking Act, which would establish new Federal offenses for gun trafficking and straw purchasing; David Cicilline's Untraceable Firearms Act, which would ensure that ghost guns are subject to existing Federal firearms regulations; A trio of gun storage proposals--Rosa DeLauro's Ethan's Law, Elissa Slotkin's Safe Guns, Safe Kids Act, and Sheila Jackson Lee's Kimberly Vaughan Firearms Safe Storage Act--which would establish storage regulations that keep guns out of the hands of children and award grants for firearm storage assistance programs; Dina Titus' Closing the Bump Stock Loophole Act, which would build on existing regulations banning the manufacture, sale, or possession of bump stocks for civilian use; And Ted Deutch's Keep Americans Safe Act, which would ban the sale, manufacture, and illegal possession of gun magazines that hold more than 15 rounds of ammunition. I thank each of them for their contributions to this bill and for making this country safer for all Americans. Madam Speaker, all of us in this Chamber were shaken by the images of parents in Uvalde standing in line to match their DNA to the remains of their 9- and 10-year-old children, parents who should be picking up their children from school right now but who, instead, are picking up the pieces of their lives shattered by this unimaginable loss. But the question today is: Who among us will have the courage to do something about it? Who will be able to tell mothers and fathers that their children need not go to school in a fortress just to keep them safe? Who will be able to tell children that they did all they could today to ensure that their parents will return safely from the supermarket or their office or an evening out? Who will be able to tell their constituents that they stood with them and not with the gun lobby? Americans are watching. They are begging us to protect them and their loved ones from gun violence. Who among us will answer their call? I urge all of my colleagues to join me in supporting this Protecting Our Kids Act, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), the cosponsor of the bill and a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield the gentlewoman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson), a cosponsor of the bill and the chairman of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Garcia), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I include in the Record an article dated May 31, 2022, from The New York Times titled ``California has America's Toughest Gun Laws, and They Work.'' [From the New York Times, May 31, 2022] California Has America's Toughest Gun Laws, and They Work (By Shawn Hubler) The grotesque toll of gun violence is again being debated in Congress. As Luis Ferre-Sadurni and I reported over the long weekend, states are not holding their breath. Particularly this state: In ways that have tended to be underreported, California has significantly lowered gun deaths, Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and longtime firearm violence researcher, told me this week. ``For the last 20, maybe even 25 years--except for the two years of the pandemic, which have increased homicides and suicides across the country--our rates of firearm violence have trended downward,'' said Dr. Wintemute, who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento. ``And this has been at a time when most of the rates in the rest of the country have gone up.'' California's rate of firearm mortality is among the nation's lowest, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, compared with 13.7 per 100,000 nationally and 14.2 per 100,000 in Texas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. And Californians are about 25 percent less likely to die in mass shootings, compared with residents of other states, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California analysis. I asked Dr. Wintemute how California is different. Here's a lightly edited excerpt from our conversation, which took place on Memorial Day after his emergency room shift: Just a couple of weeks ago, California had a mass shooting. By what measures are our policies a success? You have to look at it on a population basis. We do have more mass shootings in California, but we're also by far the largest state. I looked a while ago at the rates of firearm violence across the 21st century--homicide and suicide together--and the rest of the country was up, but California's rates were so far down that the average was flat. We always hear that nothing works, that even California's strict gun laws are ineffective. That's because we evaluate policies one at a time, in isolation. The results for one policy might be mixed or even negative. But what California has done over a number of decades has been to enact a whole bundle of policies that I think work in synergy, to measurable effect. It sounds like the ``Swiss cheese model'' public health experts have used to address Covid. Yes. The idea is to prevent the holes in the policies from lining up. But if we rank the states, California's rate of firearm violence ranks 29th out of 50 states for homicides and 44th for suicides. Can you share some examples? California has done a lot to prevent high-risk people from purchasing firearms. We've broadened the criteria for keeping guns out of the hands of people who pose a danger to themselves or others due to mental illness. If you're convicted of a violent misdemeanor in California, you can't have a gun for the next 10 years; that offense has to be a felony in most states. We require background checks, and not just from licensed retailers; in most states, purchases from private parties require no background checks or record keeping of any kind. We have a system, that we're evaluating now, for getting guns back from ``prohibited persons''--people who have been convicted of violent crimes or who are facing domestic violence restraining orders. And we enforce these policies, unlike a lot of other states. What else? In the early 1990s, cheap handguns--``Saturday Night Specials''--were almost entirely manufactured around Los Angeles. It was a few companies making upward of 800,000 cheap handguns a year. So the state imposed standards for design and safety. One of the companies has since gone to Nevada. The rest went belly-up and no one else has come in to fill the gap. What about gaps? Every time California sets a new standard, the gun industry tries to outwit it. Unregulated ghost guns have become immensely popular here, precisely because we're such a tightly regulated market. And the state program to recover guns from prohibited people has never had the level of funding it needs to do the whole job--there are only about 40 trained agents for the whole state and a backlog of at least 10,000 people whose guns need to be taken. Overall, what could the rest of the country learn from California? The lower the prevalence of ownership, the lower the rate of firearm violence--that's been one of the most robust research findings for decades. Rates of gun ownership are lower here, in part because of this bundle of state measures. In the United States overall, something like 25 percent to 30 percent of individuals own guns. In California, it's about 15 percent to 18 percent.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, the evidence doesn't lie. California's rate of firearm mortality is among the Nation's lowest, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, compared with 13.7 per 100,000 nationally and 14.2 per 100,000 in Texas. Gun safety laws work. It is that simple. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. NADLER. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline), a member of the Judiciary Committee.