Remarks by Del. Price on Gun Violence Prevention

House Democrats are unified in our commitment to ending the scourge of gun violence. We need evidence-based reforms. Community-driven solutions. To address the root causes of gun violence together. Failed policies from the 90s won't cut it. My full remarks below.

Good Morning! As established we are here to express our continued commitment to work for safer communities. As it pertains to gun violence, the district that I serve has been in the news far too many times due to lives being taken way too soon by what has sadly become known as everyday gun violence.  While we work on the evidence-based proposals that we know work, we also want to make sure that we fully and accurately understand the impacts of gun violence in our communities.  Yes, many families know the gut wrenching pain of losing a loved one.  But we all are impacted, socially, emotionally, physically, and economically in areas where violence occurs regularly. We need JLARC to study the radiating impacts into our communities across the Commonwealth so we can continue to pass laws and budgets that actually help those who need it. And we know that this will be a multi-year process of getting to where we need to be, so a JLARC report with recommendations can help us along the way.  A study should be supported in a bipartisan way, unless knowing the truth about the extent to which guns negatively impact our communities is a truth our colleagues want to keep hidden. The opponents of our proposals don’t just want to halt our progress, they want to take us back…. Back to the failed policies of the 1990s. But we know that in order to truly create more peaceful neighborhoods, we must invest in prevention, intervention, enforcement, and reentry.  The current administration has hijacked precious gun violence prevention funding to create a slush fund for the Attorney General.  Any one can tell you, we cannot arrest our way out of this problem, or by now at our mass incarceration rates, we’d be the safest nation in the world.  Senator McClellan and I are working together to clarify that the millions we allocate for gun violence prevention needs to go right to the communities and organizations who are doing the hard work of prevention. And as we celebrate his birthday, I'll leave you with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – “Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”