It’s impossible to talk about protecting the homeland from terrorists without addressing gun control laws, one New York Democrat said on Wednesday.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing titled “Stopping the next attack: How to keep our city streets from becoming the battleground,” Rep. Brian Higgins said American streets already are a battleground where people are 3,000 times more likely to be killed by an American with a gun than by a terrorist.
“You can’t with any credibility hold a hearing with the topic ‘stopping the next attack, how to keep our cities from becoming battlegrounds,’ without fundamentally addressing what most people on this panel agree with and that is very commonsensical gun safety measures,” Higgins said.
In the 15 years since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, 94 people have been killed in the U.S. by Islamic terrorists, he said. In that same time, 157,000 Americans have been killed by guns.
He spoke about some of the major shootings in the U.S., including at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which killed 49 people, and the shooting in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26, including 20 children.
“People often invoke the Second Amendment to justify the continuing of this hell, but the framers of our Constitution in establishing the Second Amendment could never have anticipated this kind of hell,” he said.
Higgins also expressed support for legislation that would prevent those on the no-fly list from purchasing guns.
Asked to respond, John Miller, the deputy commissioner on intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, talked about how each shooting was followed by a few weeks of discussion on gun control before the issue fell by the wayside with no changes.
“Some might have said when they kill our kindergarten students in our schools that would be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but we talked about that for a while then nothing happened either,” Miller said.
“In some measure, when you consider the fact that the greatest loss of life on U.S. soil since the 9/11 terrorist attack happened at 2 o’clock in the morning on a place off the main path, an LGBT club on Latino night by a lone wolf gunman … you have to ask yourself: Have we figured out who we are and do we want to change?” he said.
Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., said the conversation turned to gun control only because that’s “the narrative of the Left,” and said that gun-free zones actually pose a greater problem, pointing specifically to the shooting in the Orlando LGBT bar where guns could not be carried.
“If more gun laws were the answer … the south side of Chicago would be the safest place on Earth,” he said.
He also said Republicans oppose preventing those on the no-fly list from buying guns because there’s no due process to get on and off the list, of which American citizens make up 20 percent.
Duncan also said Higgins’ statistics are misleading because suicides are included.
