{"id":47733,"date":"2021-03-26T16:25:59","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T22:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bennet-remembers-boulder-victims-on-senate-floor\/"},"modified":"2021-03-26T22:25:59","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T22:25:59","slug":"bennet-remembers-boulder-victims-on-senate-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bennet-remembers-boulder-victims-on-senate-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"Bennet remembers Boulder victims on Senate floor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><figure class=\"wp-block-image naviga-inline-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/imengine.public.prod.dur.navigacloud.com\/?uuid=33ccd26f-f130-4062-b595-159929c78add&amp;function=cover&amp;type=preview&amp;source=false&amp;width=2000\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1114\" alt=\"In a speech at the Senate, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet read the names and ages of the victims killed earlier this week in a shooting in Boulder. He said each of the 10 victims represent \u201cthe best of Colorado.\u201d\" class=\"naviga-image\" loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">In a speech at the Senate, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet read the names and ages of the victims killed earlier this week in a shooting in Boulder. He said each of the 10 victims represent \u201cthe best of Colorado.\u201d<\/span><span class=\"credit\">Screenshot<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><p>U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet shared personal anecdotes and urged his colleagues to vote for better gun control legislation Wednesday on the Senate floor in the wake of Monday\u2019s deadly shootings in Boulder.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy heart goes out to all the families, and the entire community of Boulder,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cWe have endured too many tragedies as a state.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, less than a week after eight people, mostly of Asian descent, were shot and killed in Atlanta, 10 people were killed in a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. The suspect has been charged and is in custody.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s long past time for Congress to take meaningful action to keep deadly weapons out of the wrong hands,\u201d Bennet said in a news release issued Monday after the shooting. \u201cThere are steps that the overwhelming majority of Americans want us to take. And they have every right to expect us to finally do something about gun violence in our country. Enough is enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, he called for similar action.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe can\u2019t allow this to become normal,\u201d Bennet said on the Senate floor.<\/p>\n<p>Bennet spent 15 minutes talking about the Boulder shooting. In his speech, he shared information about the 10 victims, lamented how younger people, including his 21-year-old daughter, have grown up \u201cin the shadow of gun violence\u201d and urged his fellow senators to pass legislation to prevent future tragedies.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy daughter\u2019s generation will always bear the burden of a national government that did nothing to protect them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Bennet, D-Colo., shared the names of the victims, their ages, their occupations and some personal anecdotes, quoting their family and friends in his speech as well as some of their own posts on the internet.<\/p>\n<p>He said each of the victims represent \u201cthe best of Colorado.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m just asking us to show an ounce of their courage, by doing whatever we can to keep weapons of war out of our communities; to pass universal background checks; to limit the size of magazines; to address the epidemic crisis of mental health in this country,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cIt seems like that would be the least that we could do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The senator\u2019s tone and presence was solemn during his speech, and he was visibly choked up at times. He frequently paused to wipe away tears.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video wp-block-embed-youtube naviga-video-embed\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rtrbZmAxCMg\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>\u201cThey have grown up with a reasonable fear that they will be shot in their classrooms, or in their schools, or at a movie theater, or in any public place,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cI didn\u2019t grow up in an America with more gun-related deaths than virtually any country in this world. And we can\u2019t accept it for their America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He brought up the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He said the vote taken in the Senate after the Sandy Hook shooting was \u201cone of the darkest moments\u201d of his career, because \u201cthe Senate couldn\u2019t even pass universal background checks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWho are we to insist that they live terrified in their own country? Nobody insisted that we live that way,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cBut our failure to act has helped create these conditions. And we can\u2019t wait any longer. The Senate needs to act. There\u2019s nobody else to act but the United States Senate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in this month, the U.S. House passed two bills that would increase background checks on people looking to purchase firearms in a partisan vote. Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., opposed the legislation.<\/p>\n<p>Boebert condemned the violence on Monday, but maintained her stance against gun control and said Democrats should \u201cstop focusing on gun control and start focusing on border control,\u201d in a tweet Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>The two gun-control bills have been received in the Senate, but have yet to be scheduled to be debated or voted on.<\/p>\n<p><em class=\"mwc_shirttail\">Grace George is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal in Cortez and a student at American University in Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>tearful address, senator shares personal anecdotes about victims<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47734,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29,25,1566],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-47733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter","tag-u-s-sen-michael-bennet","tag-u-s-senate"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47733"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=47733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}