Grassley on the Reintroduction of the EAGLES Act

NOTE: Read more about the EAGLES Act of 2021 HERE.

 

Prepared Floor Remarks by U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member

On the Reintroduction of the EAGLES Act

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

 

Three years ago, on February 14, 2018, an unspeakable tragedy occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

 

In less than four minutes, 14 students and 3 staff members were killed, their families and friends’ lives shattered by such a senseless act.

 

Today, along with my colleagues Senators Rubio and Scott of Florida, Senators Cortez Masto, Collins, Manchin and Hassan, I’m proud to reintroduce legislation that will proactively mitigate threats of violence on school campuses by reauthorizing and expanding the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center.

 

The National Threat Assessment Center studies targeted violence and develops best practices and training to identify and manage threats before they result in violence.

 

The bill establishes a Safe School Initiative, a national program on school violence prevention that will include expanded research on school violence.

 

Most importantly, this legislation allows the Secret Service to directly equip communities and schools with training and best practices on recognizing and preventing school violence.

 

This bill, which I hope will help us to recognize the signs of a potential attack long before one occurs, carries the namesake of those it could have saved, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mascot – The EAGLES.

 

Two years ago, the Secret Service conducted a review of school shootings and made a pivotal finding:

 

All attackers exhibited concerning behaviors prior to engaging in an act of violence.

 

Had these signs been recognized at an early enough stage, these attacks could have been stopped.

 

In the wake of the Parkland shooting in 2018, Congress took steps to protect schools and to prevent gun violence, including the passage of the Students, Teachers, and Officers Preventing School Violence Act, which provides funding to schools to strengthen their infrastructure to make it more difficult for shooters to enter schools.

 

We also passed the Fix NICS Act, a law which penalizes federal agencies that fail to comply with legal requirements to report dangerous individuals and violent criminals to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

 

But passing the EAGLES Act is a vital third step to protect our schools.

I’d like to encourage all of my Senate colleagues to support this bipartisan, commonsense bill.

 

I hope we can focus on productive measures like these rather than unfocused efforts to undermine lawful gun ownership.