After a mass shooting this week in Atlanta, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urgently push action on gun control. Mass shootings around the United States are not stopping. To what must be the shock of Republicans, the government doing nothing or close to nothing on key issues means that nothing or close to nothing gets accomplished, leaving a proliferation of dangerous firearms around which some Republican officials are trying to remove oversight.
In several states, like Florida and Georgia, GOP leaders have pursued lifting requirements for a permit before covertly carrying a firearm.
“It is not right for us to live in a nation where nobody’s safe no matter where they are,” Warnock said. “We’re not safe in our schools. We’re not safe in our workplaces. We’re not safe at the grocery store. We’re not safe at movie theaters. We’re not safe at spas. We’re not safe in our houses of worship. There is no sanctuary in the sanctuary! We’re not safe at concerts. We’re not safe at banks. We’re not safe at parades. We’re not safe in our own yards and in our own homes. And now, today, we can add medical facilities to that list. And still we have done so very little in this building to respond.”
Warnock also discussed the collective impacts from the mass shootings taking place around the United States. If Americans are generally bound together in what’s meant as a common fight for greater and greater levels of freedom, don’t incidents of deadly violence in public spaces already set us all back? The Georgia Senator also mentioned that his own children were placed under lockdown amid the incident in Atlanta as police sought to control the situation.
“There are those who want to convince us that this is the cost of freedom,” Warnock observed. He credited what’s been transpiring instead to the “cost of blind obstinance, a refusal to change course even when the evidence suggests we must do something different” and “greed,” among other factors. In place of this continuing damage, Warnock pushed for action including the imposition of universal background checks for gun purchases, which he noted are supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, according to polls. Certain individual states, though not enough to constitute a majority of the country, have imposed such requirements within their boundaries. Under Democratic leadership, Washington also recently joined the list of individual states imposing a ban on assault weapons. Check out Warnock’s speech from Wednesday below:
