Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering Asks Senate For Assault Weapon Ban

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Music and cheering was all Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering recalled hearing as she and members of the City Council kicked off the Independence Day parade on July 4.

"What I didn't know at that moment was that, just to my right, on a one-story rooftop, a 21-year-old was preparing to traumatize my hometown forever with an assault weapon," Rotering testified Wednesday before a Senate panel in Washington.

After proceeding down the route, Rotering questioned why the marching band had stopped playing music and was only playing a steady drum cadence — a sound she later identified as rifle fire.

Then, seeing a sea of marching band members sprinting away from the site of the shooting on Central Avenue and fire and police cars rushing to the scene, the mayor and her colleagues began an emergency evacuation.

"We were screaming, 'Run! Shooter!' Adults stared back, not comprehending. But the kids knew immediately. This wasn't a drill, and they yelled to everybody, 'run,' and, 'hide.' They knew what was happening," Rotering said.

Rotering testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing called "After the Highland Park Attack: Protecting Our Communities from Mass Shootings."

"I don't know why this needs to be our new normal. I don't know why we need to live this way, and I, frankly, need a better explanation to the students who have to go back to the classroom in a month to be able to say to them, 'Don't worry, we've got you,'" the mayor said.

"When I talked to students in my community, they all said to me, 'Oh yeah, we knew this was coming.' Not from this particular instance, but every single one of them said, 'We've been waiting for this our whole lives. We've been training for this our whole lives.' And they knew what to do, and they thought it would be at school. Heaven help us all," she said. "There's no way to live when you're living in this kind of fear. And I am so concerned, not just for my community, but for our country. This needs to stop."

The gunman in Highland Park shot 83 rounds into the crowd of paradegoers in less than a minute, Rotering said.

"And the most disturbing part? This is the norm in our country," she said. "Highland Park had the uniquely American experience of a 4th of July parade turned into what is now become a uniquely American experience of a mass shooting. How do we call this freedom? Other advanced nations live free of fear of gun violence and we know that mental health issues exist everywhere in our world. American mayors — and I've talked to several in these past few weeks — fear not if, but when a mass shooting is going to hit our towns. What's different about the U.S.? The U.S. has civilian access to assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. That is the only differentiating factor."

The mayor said Highland Park police were outgunned and unable to identify the origin of the gunfire before the shooting stopped.

"A good guy with a gun would have had no impact on the shooter," Rotering said.

"We had good guys with guns on site, who were trained, who got there within seconds, and it was just too hard to see where he was. We also know that these weapons and these bullets can pierce Kevlar vests," she said. "I think the fact that we had less than a minute should tell anybody who thought that a good guy with a gun would have had an impact the only thing that would have happened would have been more chaos, more carnage, you would have had people shooting all over the place. That absolutely would have been a disaster in Highland Park."

Rotering said the Highland Park Police Department did everything possible to prevent the suspected gunman from getting his hands of the weapons used in the shooting.

"My police did everything right, and they followed the rules and they tried everything that they had at their disposal to make sure that these weapons weren't able to be obtained," she said. "And yet, here we are."

Highland Park police filed a "clear and present danger" report about the suspected gunman in the July 4 shooting when he was 18 — four months before Illinois State Police granted him a license to purchase firearms.

Authorities said he legally purchased two semiautomatic assault-style rifles — a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 left at the scene of the shooting and a Kel-Tec SUB-2000 recovered at the time of his arrest.

This week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration announced an emergency rule change to allow for such reports to be retained even if the subject of the report is not determined to be a danger.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the senior Republican on the committee, recounted how no red flags preventing gun ownership were implemented after the Highwood man charged in the July 4 shooting attempted suicide and reportedly threatened to kill members of his household.

"It would be easy to say that the system just failed — that the police should have done more, his family should have done more," he said. "But there actually is something that would have made a difference. We have to educate the institutions in a person's life about these obvious signs of distress, these obvious signs that a person is heading towards mass violence. Schools in many states have implemented threat assessment models, but more institutions, including churches [and] workplaces, want and need training."

Grassley called for the passage of a bipartisan bill he introduced in 2018 following a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The EAGLES Act, named after the mascot of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, would expand the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and increase its focus on preventing violence in schools.

The Iowa Republican said he would submit a statement from a family member of one of the victims of the Highland Park shooting who expressed concern about increased firearm restrictions. He said he would not support an assault weapons ban and pointed to a 2004 Department of Justice study that did not show evidence the ban resulted in reduced gun homicides.

Joining Rotering in testifying at Tuesday's committee hearing was U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), who emphasized that gun violence has become the leading cause of death of Americans under the age of 16.

"I'm urging the committee to demonstrate courage in supporting a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines," Duckworth said.

"We can't stop every mass shooting. [Grassley] spoke about identifying those with mental health issues. I agree we should do all of that. There are predictable steps that he mentioned. That is part of it. But part of those predictable steps also includes, unfortunately in recent years, the purchasing or the building of assault weapons," Duckworth said.

"[Grassley] quoted statistics from 2004 that said there'd been no significant change as of 2004," she said. "We have more recent data, and the data shows that mass shootings in this nation has tripled since the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire."

Duckworth, an Iraq War Veteran and Purple Heart recipient, said a reintroduction of the assault weapons ban and a ban on large-capacity magazines would not prevent sportsmen and hunters from accessing thousands of types of hunting rifles but was aimed at keeping weapons of war off the street.

"From their portability, accuracy, rate of fire ability to penetrate certain body armor and ease of reloading, both the military-issued M4 Carbine and the civilian AR-15, and its variants, are functionally similar and they are designed for combat. The lack of a three-round burst or full-auto mechanism does not meaningfully reduce the AR-15's lethality compared to the M4," Duckworth testified.

"Whether it's a soldier engaging the enemy in combat, or an untrained mass murderer hunting children in a school — any shooter — any shooter looking to efficiently kill multiple people without wasting ammunition will prefer a semi-auto rifle coupled with a detachable large-capacity magazine that enables rapid reloading," she said. "It chambers a round that quickly. As quickly as you can pull the trigger, it is chambering a new round."

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said he was proud of the way Congress responded to the mass shooting at school in Uvalde, Texas, last month. Cornyn was one of the chief sponsors of the bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

"I always said that the test of that legislation will be 'will it save lives?' And I believe it will. That, I believe, should be the test of any legislative action we take. In addition to focusing on the profile of some of the alienated young men who lash out, not only committing suicide themselves, but taking the lives of others, we tried to figure out how to get at people who are suffering from mental health crisis that none of us believe should have access to firearms," Cornyn said.

"I believe that the Second Amendment and good policy are not mutually exclusive," he said.

Several Republican senators said the relatively strict state and local gun regulations in place in Illinois were insufficient to stop the July 4 shooting, with several citing the number of gun homicides in the city of Chicago to argue against firearm ownership restrictions.

"One of the object lessons, I think, of what happened in Highland Park, is the strictest gun laws in the nation did not prevent this terrible act," added Cornyn, who said street gang members armed with illegal weapons drive most of the gun violence in the U.S.

U.S. Sen Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) pushed back on the conflation of the 30,000-person Lake County suburb with the 2.7 million metropolis — the nation's third largest city — about 28 miles to its south. He noted also that his hometown of East St. Louis, as well as Rockford, both have higher rates of gun violence than Chicago.

"Let me also note for the record that Chicago is not Highland Park," Durbin said, to one of the largest applauses of the hearing.

"I'm proud to represent both communities. There are challenges in both communities. Highland Park is in a separate county, for those who are not familiar, and is not the same jurisdiction as the city of Chicago," he said. "The gun violence problem in Chicago is a serious one, but much different than the shooting incident that occurred on July 4 that brings us together today."

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Highland Park passed a municipal ordinance banning the possession of assault weapons in 2013 following a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. That ordinance was challenged in federal court and upheld in 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal of a ruling by the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Highland Park municipal officials have actively enforced the ordinance. Cook County's ordinance has also been upheld by federal courts, but county officials have never enforced it.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz said political debates take place every time there are horrific mass murders, and he said everyone on the committee wanted to prevent the next one.

Cruz described two approaches to stopping mass murderers, one of which he said he supported — prosecuting "bad guys," fugitives, felons and the mentally ill when they try to illegally buy guns and enhance the security of vulnerable places like schools and churches. He described the other — gun control laws, such restrictions on concealed firearms and assault-style weapons — as ineffective and counterproductive.

"This topic is serious. I commend the witnesses for being here," Cruz said, concluding his remarks without asking a question of the panel. "I wish the members of this committee treated it with the seriousness to actually ask, 'What stops crime and stops murders?' Because the political solutions this body has put forward does not do that."

Durbin took exception to Cruz's remarks, telling his fellow judiciary committee member that he had gone too far.

"He questioned 'the seriousness' of our effort. How could he do that? In light of what you've been through, what America's been through with guns, how could you question any good faith attempt to reduce gun violence in this country?" Durbin asked. "We may draw different conclusions and have different approaches, but for goodness' sake, there's nothing more serious than what happened on the 4th of July in Highland Park."

Watch: Full July 20, 2022 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing "After the Highland Park Attack: Protecting Our Communities from Mass Shootings" »