Today, following a spate of horrific mass shootings in recent days, most recently in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Senator Cory Booker participated in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on gun violence and proposed safety reforms.

Key Excerpts

“We forget the very mandate of our government of our federal government and so the best mandate is perhaps the Constitution of the United States of America that begins with the purpose of why we’re all here. And I just read the first four reasons why we’re here, ‘We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and provide for the common defense….’ And if you look at that, in the context of the slaughter of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans — I’m roughly 50 years old — in my lifetime, there are more people that have died of gun violence than in every single war in our nation’s history, from the revolution, to the current wars going on right now. Why? Why are we here? Why did we establish this government if not to better defend ourselves? And yet we see slaughter every day.”

“…we are way out of step with every other nation on the planet Earth in the number of Americans that are being killed. And somehow we don’t think we have the power to stop this…. It trashes our strength in our economy, because every gunshot wound in America costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that’s nothing compared to what it’s doing to our nation’s soul. We must create a more beloved community, and the lies or the fear mongering about how somehow law-abiding citizens won’t have access to guns is just belied by the evidence and the data.”

“We are not fulfilling our mandate. We do not have domestic tranquility. We do not have a common defense, with death levels that no one country is seeing. And dear God, clearly we do not have justice.”