Dallas City Wire

WASHINGTON – On May 24, on the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX on May 24, 2022, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) spoke on the House Floor honoring the 21 victims and calling upon her colleagues to pass meaningful gun reform to stop the surge of gun violence in America.

 

Congresswoman Crockett's remarks, as prepared, are below: 

I rise on behalf of the nineteen children and two teachers murdered in Uvalde, Texas one year ago today.

One excruciating year has passed for the families of those we lost at Robb Elementary that day, a year of empty childhood bedrooms and vacant desks where a child should be.

One full year – and what do we have to show for it? What has this legislative body done to answer the pain of these parents with action?

I ask myself this: Have we passed any measures on this floor that will stop the next Uvalde?

The answer to that is obvious: no, we have not. Because in the year since the 2nd worst school shooting in American history, there has been 39 more.

My district is about 355 miles north of Uvalde – but the horror of that day haunts every Texan as if it happened right next door.

Maybe that’s because it is happening next door – in a wave of gun violence that has touched every corner of Texas and every public space we once saw as safe.

Just this month, my home of North Texas grieved the deaths of eight Texans in a hateful act of violence at a shopping mall. That was the ninth mass shooting in Texas in fourteen years – fourteen years that lawmakers in Texas and Washington have used to loosen gun regulations. 

Well, I’ll tell you something, as a Texan and as an American: I am tired of grieving. Texas is tired of grieving.

Thoughts and prayers don’t stop bullets, and the 21 Texans ripped from their families last year deserve more. The people of Uvalde who have grieved and cried and demanded change deserve more.

I hope we don’t come back here in a year with the same amount of nothing to show to these grieving families.

I hope we can show up having passed universal background checks that would’ve stopped their murderer from getting his hands on their murder weapon, and a ban on the weapon of war that stole their children’s lives.

To my colleagues, I challenge you: let’s not fail these parents again.

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Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett represents portions of Dallas and Tarrant Counties, with the cities of Dallas, Grand Prairie, DeSoto, Cedar Hill, Lancaster, Duncanville, Glenn Heights, Hutchins, Wilmer, Arlington, Ovilla, and Seagoville.

Original source can be found here.