U.S. Senator Tina Smith Delivers Floor Speech Remembering Annunciation School Shooting Victims, Pushes for Congress to Pass Gun Safety Legislation

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Tina Smith delivered a speech on the floor of the United States Senate after the tragic shooting at Annunciation Catholic School last week. You can watch Sen. Smith's floor speech here.

You can read Sen. Smith's remarks as delivered below:

Mr. President, I stand before this body trying to make sense of the terrible shooting at Annunciation Catholic School just a couple of miles from where Archie and I live in Minneapolis. And I can't. I can't make it make sense.

You know, I know this neighborhood really well. I've lived in and around it for many, many years. And I also know Annunciation School. Mr. President, Annunciation School is one of those places where, whether your kids go there or not, it's two degrees of separation from everybody that you would know. If it's not your child, it's someone you know - their niece, their nephew, their grandchild, their child.

And here in Annunciation Catholic School on a fall morning, sweet children were gunned down when they went to mass to celebrate the beginning of the school year, and their sense of peace and safety was shattered like the church windows that the bullets flew through.

Fletcher Merkel was eight years old. His dad said that Fletcher had an infectious smile, and he danced with every touchdown he scored in flag football. He loved his family and his friends, and he loved fishing and cooking.

Harper Moyski was ten. Her parents say that she was a bright, joyful, and deeply loved child whose laughter and kindness and spirit touched everyone who knew her.

There were 21 others shot that morning. There's a twelve-year-old little girl in critical condition. Her mother, who's a pediatric nurse at the ICU in Hennepin County Medical Center, she rushed to the hospital when she heard that there was a shooting, only to find her own daughter in the emergency room.

Another supervising nurse rushed to the ER to help, even though it wasn't her shift. And when she did, she found a little girl who was so scared and so terrified that she climbed into the CT scan with that little girl to stroke her hair and hold her hand so that she would not have to be alone.

There's another little girl whose dad is a gym teacher at Annunciation, and she is still in the hospital, recovering from surgery yesterday, but she seems to be moving in the right direction. She was hurt while she was shielding her little buddy, which is what she calls a therapy dog.

A fifth grader recounted how after the shooting, he was worried that he had gotten some gunpowder on his neck. It turned out that he had been hit by a bullet fragment that lodged so close to his artery that he needed to have surgery to remove it. He said he had dived under a pew, and a friend of his had crawled on top of him to protect him from the gunfire, and that friend was shot in the back.

So here we are - incredible bravery from these kiddos and their families. Heroic efforts of the teachers and first responders and law enforcement, and also of the doctors and nurses in the emergency rooms who saved their lives. And we have all of these feelings of grief, of rage, of frustration, I think even confusion.

You know, these school shootings are searingly personal to people, and also they're often so public, and they are not uncommon. Just in Minnesota, we remember the two students that were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota, and we remember the nine students and seven injured at Red Lake Senior High School on the Red Lake Nation.

And we ask ourselves all the time: How can this happen? How do we let this keep on happening? We are thrust into this tragic cycle of collective grief and frustration and anger, and our hearts are broken for the families and the loved ones whose lives and sense of security and safety have been stolen. Our voices call out for change to end the scourge of gun violence, and our anger and frustration grows when people feel like their voices are being ignored.

And I'm angry because we keep choosing to protect the interests of this big gun lobby rather than the lives of our little babies, and we can do better than this.

Only in this country do we see this toxic mix of hatred and guns cost so many lives. There are over 400 million guns in this country - more guns than people. The shooter in Minneapolis was able to buy these guns that they had legally and then fire all these rounds into a church sanctuary from a rifle that was designed not for hunting, not for self-defense, but for killing people.

Now, Mr. President, you know, I have been in the Senate now for nearly eight years, and I'm a realist. I know how this goes - the hopes and the prayers and then the moving on. And I know how this goes. But I'm also an optimist, and I believe that if we don't try, nothing will ever change.

And so I ask this body to listen to the words of people - not political people - who are pleading for change, who are asking us to pray by moving our feet and to take action.

As my colleague, my dear colleague Senator Klobuchar said, Pope Leo asked this past weekend for us to plead to God to stop the pandemic of arms, large and small, which infects our world.

Annunciation Principal Matthew DeBoer said this. He said, "We can't change the past, but we can do something about the future." There's an African proverb, Principal DeBoer said, that goes, "When you pray, move your feet. So I beg you." He continued, "I ask you to please pray, but don't stop with your words. Let's make a difference and support this community and these children and these families and teachers, and never again can we let this happen."

A Minneapolis student wrote an opinion piece for our newspaper, the Star Tribune, and they said: "Do not offer thoughts and prayers as you systematically enable these tragedies. Do not claim prayers are sufficient when children die as they pray. Do not pretend you do not understand."

Sam Hasler has a four-year-old and a five-year-old children who were at Annunciation. And this is what he said:

"I'm heartbroken this happened. That the third day of school was marred by something my kids may carry forever, even though they weren't physically harmed. That the joy of a new school year gave way to fear almost instantly. I'm sad knowing this will happen again in another school, in another town, and we'll do it all again. The GoFundMes. The social posts. The trauma interviews."

Sam continued, "It always comes back to the guns. We are not the only country with mental illness or social media, or divided politics. But we are the only one where this happens again and again, and we shrug and we stall because regulating weapons of war is somehow off the table.

If the right to own these guns matters more than children's right to live, then say that out loud." That's what this father said. "Let the rest of us decide how to live in a country like that. For me, though, that is not okay. It is not normal."

Harper Moyski's grieving parents said, "While our immediate focus is on Harper and our family's healing, we also believe it is important that her memory fuels action. No family should ever have to endure this kind of pain. We urge our leaders and communities to take meaningful steps to address gun violence and the mental health crisis in this country. Change is possible, and it is necessary so that Harper's story does not become yet another in a long line of tragedies."

These are the words of people who have lived through this tragedy.

Colleagues, this body has shown that we can take steps to keep our children safer. After the tragedy in Uvalde, my colleague Chris Murphy and Republicans joined together to write the Safer Communities Act, which invested billions of dollars to help Americans, and especially young people, get the mental health support that they need. And it took important, meaningful steps to make it harder for dangerous people to get guns. More work to do, but we showed that we could make progress.

Today, I plead with my Republican colleagues to stand up to this administration as it is refusing to fund those local violence prevention initiatives - those grants that we funded in a bipartisan way through the Safer Communities Act. We should undo the cuts to Medicaid that just got pushed through with the Big Beautiful Bill, and it's the number one source of insurance for people who are seeking mental health care in this country.

We should condemn the Secretary of Health and Human Services when he says, with no basis, that somehow antidepressants cause school shootings. And then we should come together and negotiate in a meaningful way to keep assault weapons like the ones that killed and injured the students of Annunciation Catholic School out of the hands of dangerous people.

Now we know there is no one answer to this terrible scourge of gun violence that is killing our children. There is no one thing that we can do to change the shameful statistic that the number one cause of death for children in this country are firearms. But because there's no one answer doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. We have to try.

And so, to any Minnesota children, especially those who go to Annunciation School, that are listening right now, I just want to say to you this: Your community loves you, your family loves you, and we're going to do everything we can to keep you safe. I am in awe of your resilience, but you should never have to go through what you've been through this last week. I am so sorry that the adults have not done enough to keep you safe, and we need to do better.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.