Senator Cory Booker on Gun Violence: It's Time to Close Legal Loopholes | Big Think

When it comes to gun safety in America, we all have to agree, whatever your view is, that we have too much gun violence; that we are alone in humanity for the level of violence we have in our own communities. This is not a war zone, but we have 90 people dying from gun violence virtually every day. With certain populations, even more evident, young African American men is the leading cause of death. We have a Virginia Tech every day in terms of just the number of people who succumb to murder and that type of related gun violence.

And so I don’t care who you are as America. This is an unacceptable reality. And for us to have built a level of tolerance of this is, to me, disappointing; is not even the right word. It is deeply frustrating and painful that we as a society would tolerate this. Now that said, there are obviously strong emotions where people believe in Second Amendment rights to own guns, where people who are sportsmen and women believe the need to own guns.

And there are people out there who have guns because they fear for their lives and believe they should have a right to defend themselves. I am one of those people that believes that we can respect those three groups – people who are strident on the Second Amendment, people who believe that they need weapons to protect themselves and people, especially people who are in it for the sport. That we can do common sense gun safety things that can make us all safe, including people who have guns.

And I know that this is not a minority opinion that I have because when we poll gun owners, the overall majority, 60 percent, 70 percent, sometimes 80 percent agree with common sense steps that we can take for gun safety. So there are loopholes that need to be closed that I think most people would agree. Right now, we have a situation where if you abuse your spouse and have been charged, convicted of that, you can’t buy a weapon.

Well, there’s a loophole that involves it; it’s not your spouse but your boyfriend. We need to close that. Domestic violence happens too often in our country and there are ways we know to protect that. And states that have been more aggressive have seen violence against women using guns drop. We have the data that shows it, and this is a simple common sense thing that we need to do that, again, most Americans agree on.

We should not have a country where you are suspected of terrorism and you can easily buy a gun. We should have common sense background checks. And if that background check takes longer than 24 hours, so be it, because the overriding majority have instant checks. So, because there’s such a realm of common sense things that don’t infringe those groups I mentioned earlier, the question is: why aren’t we doing them?

And that’s something that I believe is reflective of all of us, and our sense of urgency and demand is not what it needs to be to get Congress to move. And we should understand that so much better is possible, and I’m a big believer that if better is possible, even good is not enough.

And what we have right now, with the level of violence, is not good; it’s deplorable. So my hope is that we can just find that common ground, that common sense reality, do the things that are going to protect ourselves. Remember what happened in Paris. Many of those people could have come to our country without a visa; they’re on the visa waiver program.

Foreign nationals on our soil could have walked into a gun shop or a gun show, loaded up a trunk full of weapons and done the same kind of carnage or worse here because of our lax gun laws. Now I don’t know many Americans that believe that foreign nationals on our soil should be able to buy weapons so easily without common sense checks and the like.

And so for all of us who believe in that, we should be doing something about it because I fear that these mass shootings make it worse. That we’ll have more bloodshed and more violence until we come around to the understanding that we should be doing the common sense gun safety things that can make us all safer.