WASHINGTON, DC— Congressman Jim Himes (CT-4) joined leading gun-safety advocate Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, Democratic Leadership, and other proponents of gun safety for a press conference today in Washington to urge passage of a bill to outlaw assault magazines. Himes also supports reinstating the assault weapons ban and legislation to close loopholes that allow the purchase of a gun without a background check.
Video of Himes speaking at the press conference is available here, and the transcript of his remarks follows.
Good morning, I’m Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut. We are a small state that lately has become large in the public imagination for all the wrong reasons. The Town of Newtown starts at the northern border of my district. It would be better if my friend and colleague, Chris Murphy, whose district Newtown lies in, were here today, but he's in Newtown attending funerals. Today in Newtown we will bury Daniel Barden, 7 years old; Chase Kowalski, 7 years old; Caroline Previdi, 6 years old; Victoria Soto, a teacher who died shielding a child, 27 years old; and Charlotte Bacon, 6 years old.
We came together on Sunday, John and Joe and Rosa, myself and Chris with the Senators to be at that vigil where so many in the families were in the room for the first time collectively expressing their unimaginable emotion, and permeating the air with a question we can't answer which is ‘why?’ We can't answer that question. But over time the urgency of that question has got to transform itself in the minds of every single American and certainly in the commitment of every single elected official to do all that we can to prevent what happened in Newtown from ever happening again. That is something that we cannot escape as a responsibility.
We have talked a lot about the things that we need to do. There is absolutely no justification for weapons that were made for the explicit purpose of killing lots of people quickly to be in the hands of civilians. There is no logic for not having comprehensive and intelligent background checks.
If six months from now we gather and we have done nothing, it won't be because the arguments against doing something have been good. There are no arguments against doing something. And part of the point of our being here today is to ask not just our colleagues but the American people to join us in this effort.
And there are no arguments against doing so, starting with the pernicious argument, most lately articulated by Governor Rick Perry of Texas, this argument that more guns in a nation awash in guns will make us safer. The facts, the history, the data show that that is not true. A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a suicide or a murder than it is to be used in self-defense. A study by the rand corporation of trained officers of the law in a situation of an exchange ever gunfire, found that those officers hit their intended target less than two out of 10 times. So the notion that more Americans, quote-unquote, in the words of Governor Perry, ‘packing heat,’ will make us safer is not founded in reality, facts, or history; it is founded in the fantasy of testosterone-laden individuals who have blood on their hands for articulating that idea.
We will not fail because there are good arguments standing against us; we will fail because of the inevitable drift of attention. And there are some questions apart from ‘why’ that need to be asked by all of us and by every American. We've got a big group up here, but we are a small fraction of the United States Congress. Why? Every one of us up here is a Democrat. Why? We’ve got to ask the American people to start asking that questions to their public officials and elected officials. And if six months from now we gather and we have drifted, I wonder what Daniel and Chase and Carolyn and Victoria and Charlotte would think of us if they were here to think of us.