I’ve cried with children who have lost their parents, and with parents whose children were killed before their eyes. I’ve prayed with families who have just come through hell, and with those who are living with memories that will haunt them for life.
I’ve seen too much death and carnage and agonizing grief. And there is something profoundly wrong with the evil-doers who commit such horrific acts. The fabric of our society has been badly frayed; the civic institutions of church and family and community that used to knit us together have been tragically weakened.
Not all of the solutions are governmental. Many of them, instead, can be found in the church and in strengthening our families and our communities.
But there is an important role for government and laws too. In 2013, when I was newly elected to the Senate, we confronted these issues head on. That spring, a deranged madman shot and killed twenty-six people, including twenty young children, in Newtown, Connecticut.
President Obama had just been reelected, and Democrats had control of the Senate. They were surging politically, and Democrats responded to Newtown by introducing a series of aggressive gun-control measures. Brimming with confidence, Senator Chuck Schumer declared on one of the Sunday shows that Democrats were in “the sweet spot” on gun control and they would prevail.
Although I had only been in the Senate a couple of months, I led the fight against their misguided gun-control proposals. And, by marshaling the facts and the law, by focusing on the Constitution and also on what actually works, we defeated every one of the Democratic power grabs.
On the Judiciary Committee, I charged into the debates with enthusiasm, asking, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein why the Second Amendment used the words “the right of the people”—the same operative language as the First and Fourth Amendments—and whether she would support limiting First and Fourth Amendment rights the way she was proposing to do with Second Amendment rights. She responded indignantly (in an exchange that went viral online), “I am not a sixth grader!”
I was puzzled by that response. Of course she wasn’t a sixth grader; if she were, I wouldn’t have been asking her substantive constitutional questions. No, she’s a senator serving on the Judiciary Committee, and she was proposing legislation to significantly restrict constitutional rights. It was a demonstration of respect—not disrespect—to ask her to engage in the substance. But, such things are rarely done in the Senate.
Virtually all of the Democratic proposals were directed at restricting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That may be a political objective for Democrats, but it is singularly ineffective for reducing violent crime.
If you look to the data, virtually all of the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws have among the highest crime rates and murder rates. Conversely, most of the jurisdictions with the most permissive gun laws have among the lowest crime rates and murder rates. Many more rural states, such as Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and West Virginia, have among the highest gun ownership rates and the lowest murder and manslaughter rates, according to recent data.
Economist John Lott, then a professor at Yale, wrote a groundbreaking book in 1998 called More Guns, Less Crime. In it, he examined the effects of changing gun laws. He looked to what happened to crime rates, before and after, and, he concluded that the empirical data demonstrate that disarming law-abiding citizens increases violent crime, and allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves decreases violent crime. As Lott wrote:
Criminals have ways of getting guns even when guns are banned. For example, drug gangs will get their guns to protect their drugs just as easily as they get their drugs to sell. Thus, gun control primarily disarms the citizens who obey the laws.…
But there is another side, one rarely mentioned in the media. Concealed weapons in the hands of good people can be used to save lives and stop attacks. The prospect of a criminal encountering a victim who may be armed will deter some attacks in the first place. Carrying a gun is also the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.
This should not be surprising because firearms are often used to stop violent crimes. Indeed, the Obama administration estimated that, across America, firearms are used defensively to stop crime over 1 million times per year.
Instead of undermining the rights of law-abiding citizens, what is actually effective in stopping violent crime is targeting the violent criminals.
When it comes to legislation, it is often true that you can’t beat something with nothing, so in the Spring of 2013 I introduced legislation along with Iowa senator Chuck Grassley (the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee) to prevent gun crime. The Grassley-Cruz legislation targeted violent criminals, and it worked to prevent them from getting guns in the first place and to lock them up if they violated the law. It authorized $300 million in additional funding for school safety, for things like installing bullet-proof doors and windows, purchasing metal detectors, and—most importantly—increasing the number of armed police officers on campus to keep our children safe.
The mass shooting at the Sutherland Springs church in Texas illustrates how we can be more effective stopping gun crimes. There, it was already illegal for the murderer (as a point of principle, I refrain from ever repeating the names of these mass murderers, to help deny them the fame that they crave) to own a gun, in fact doubly so. He was a felon, and federal law prohibits felons from buying or owning guns. And he had a domestic violence conviction; federal law likewise prohibits individuals with domestic violence convictions from buying or owning guns.
So how did he get his guns? Well, during the Obama administration, the Air Force failed to report his felony conviction and his domestic violence conviction to the national database. Therefore, when he went to buy his guns, he passed
