Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says Following Uvalde Massacre, His Office Is “being overwhelmed by Virginians begging for us to take action”; Calls Out Republican “Lies” About Gun Violence

In his press availability yesterday, Sen. Mark Warner had a lot to say (see video, below), including:

• “The first issue is one that I think we all are still reeling from and that is the spate of these brutal gun violence occurrences that have taken place, not only in Texas or in Buffalo or in Tulsa Oklahoma but increasingly across the country. I know there have been shootings even in the Commonwealth of Virginia over the last week or so, and my office is frankly being overwhelmed by Virginians begging for us to take action. This morning there were literally hundreds of young Virginians who were working with the group that came out of the Parkland shooting a number of years back saying please don’t let one more of these tragedies take place. I think particularly about the Uvaldi massacre where 19 children, two teachers were brutally murdered with a weapon of war by someone who was clearly deranged. And my hope and prayer is that this time we will do more than offer condolences that frankly ring false when we don’t take any action. So I’m strongly in support of the bipartisan effort on addressing gun violence. It probably won’t go as far as I’d like to go, but making progress  – even a first small step – at a national level I think is extraordinarily important.”
• “What i wish we would do and this is something that my dear friend Tim Kaine and I have proposed is something called the Virginia plan, because in Virginia when the legislature changed hands back in 2019 – because elections really do matter – Virginia went ahead and passed a series of laws such as universal background checks, trying to make sure we have appropriate red flag laws, trying to make sure that guns are appropriately locked up when they’re not in use, trying to make sure that we do appropriate other sensible gun action, and Tim Kaine and I have suggested that ought to be a model that we bring bring to the nation. I’m not sure what’s being proposed on a bipartisan basis is going to get there, but simply doing nothing or hearing the absurd comments from frankly some of my Republican colleagues that say well you know we need all these assault weapons because you got to hunt critters or somehow saying if we could just change the dimensions of a door in a school building that that would somehow prevent these shootings, those are frankly lies, and they don’t address the seriousness of the tragedy that families in Texas, families in Buffalo, families in Virginia have to endure on a too often a basis. And I hope and pray we we will see bipartisan action moving forward.”

Also:

• “It is absolutely critical that the Senate and House come together and pass the national investments, $52 billion in production in America of semiconductor chips…this is a national security issue; I can assure you China is racing to try to build these facilities and and potentially cut off the absolutely critical supply of chips that go into any kind of device…it is extraordinarily important for our security jobs and candidly if we’re going to start to bring down inflation on items like cars where we can’t get them into the marketplace because they there’s such a lack of semiconductor chips.”
• “Yesterday there was an announcement that Virginia was going to receive $220 million out of a program that I helped put into law, a $10 billion program administered by the Department of Treasury to help provide that affordable high-speed broadband…”
• Senator Kaine and I have been working on…the puppy testing center in Cumberland, Virginia managed by a company called Envigo. Envigo is a bad actor.…Thank god the Department of Justice has come in and taken over this investigation. We’ve already been able to rescue 450 puppies, most of these are beagle pups that were used in experimentation, 450 of those pups have been have been rescued and hopefully are going to be on the path towards getting the kind of home and love that they deserve. I say this as a dog owner. I’ve had dogs throughout my life and my three daughters have all grown up with dogs in our household...My dog Finn…I couldn’t imagine when he was a puppy enduring the kind of awful treatment hat’s gone on at this facility. And candidly we need to hold Envigo to the full extent of the law. There’s close to another 3,600 dogs that have that are still in their custody and and we need to get to the bottom of making sure those dogs and literally these are puppies are are kept safe.”
• “Frankly I’m embarrassed though when some senators stand on the floor and simply say if we could change the dimensions of the school door that’s going to prevent these tragedies from taking place. I don’t even know if they in their hearts believe it…We are the only industrial country in the world that has these kind of brutal murders and killings on a regular basis and I just hope and pray we are a better country than this, but we’ve got to rise the occasion. I’ll do my part and I’m just hoping that we’ll get over 60 votes…”
•   “Inflation is top on every Virginian, every American’s mind at this point. And what’s happening with inflation is not just happening in America, it’s happening all around the world. And as a Monday morning quarterback I think most of us would say we wish the federal reserve bank had actually started to raise interest rates a little bit earlier than they did this past spring. I called for them to raise those rates last year. Now that many economists are starting to see inflation has peaked, but we’re clearly not feeling that right now…”
•  “…Section 230 is basically a get out of jail free card for Facebook and all of the other social media platforms where they bear no responsibility for the kind of garbage that’s put out, for example in the case of Buffalo that turned this young man into going out and killing a bunch of fellow Americans simply because they were Black, all based on some crazy ‘replacement theory’ that was completely foisted upon him over the internet…To have no responsibility for that kind of hateful awful, vile I think is not right. I think you can protect your first amendment rights, I strongly believe in that. But the ability to have racist, bigoted propaganda put out and amplified four billion times as it is on Facebook, I think that goes too far and I think there are some narrow exemptions I’m trying to work with this bipartisan coalition on.”