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United States Senator Dick Durbin talks with Town Hall Apartment residents. Photo by Gretchen Rachel Hammond -
United States Senator Dick Durbin tours Town Hall apartment facility with Nadia Underhill (left). Photo by Gretchen Rachel Hammond -
United States Senator Dick Durbin. Photo by Gretchen Rachel Hammond
There, he took the opportunity to tour the LGBTQ-inclusive senior housing facility constructed on the site of the decommissioned Town Hall police station and opened in August 2014.
Durbin also sat down for a candid discussion with four of the facility’s residents George Garcia, Ted Swanson, Gary Sargeng and Carmen Garcia asking each of them about their lives and experiences as part of the Heartland Housing community.
While they responded positively, the residents raised concerns about the need for additional security at the facility particularly in terms of increased lighting outside the building.
In turn, Garcia then questioned Durbin about the current fight in Congress over gun control in the wake of the June 12 Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando Fla. that killed 49 people.
Durbin described the 15-hour filibuster launched by U.S. Senate Democrats earlier in the week.
“There were six of us and I stayed on the floor for 13 hours,” he said. “The whole purpose was to force a vote on gun control. Republicans are in control and they had not scheduled anything for this week, even after Orlando, and we said ‘That’s wrong. We’ve got to at least debate this, we should vote on this, we should try to make things better.'”
“If somebody is a suspected terrorist, we keep them off airplanes but they can still go buy guns,” Durbin added. “So why wouldn’t we keep these firearms, particularly assault weapons, out of the hands of a suspected terrorist?”
Durbin added that he and his colleagues also wanted to examine the lax policies around the sale of such weapons at gun shows.
“Forty percent of the crime guns confiscated in Chicago come from gun shows in Northern Indiana,” he said. “Why? No background check. You walk in there and show them a driver’s license, fill up the trunk of your car and take the guns into Inglewood, Lawndale and the West Side. That’s crazy. Why do we let that happen?”
Although senate Democrats were successful in forcing a vote (expected early in the week of June 20), Durbin was not optimistic about the outcome.
“We will lose,” he said. “We will lose because the other party is in control and the National Rifle Association is in control of most of their members. They are politically afraid.”
When the residents asked Durbin what they could do to help, he urged them to pick up the phone.
“We know that 80 percent of gun owners agree with us on keeping guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists,” he said. “Yet, from the people who called [my office], and it was over a thousand, 45 percent disagreed. We know they don’t represent the general population. They are the people who were organized to call and fight change.”
“I come from downstate,” Durbin added. “People love to own guns down there. Overwhelmingly these are good, honest, law-abiding people. But, if you need an AR-15 to shoot a deer, then you ought to stick to fishing. So you will see the vote on Monday and I talked to some of my colleagues and said ‘what do we do on Tuesday? Do we say ‘I’ll see you the next time there’s a mass murder?’ We can’t do that.”
For more information about the Town Hall Apartments, visit, www.heartlandhousing.org/property/town-hall-apartments.