{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-touts-lifesaving-success-of-bipartisan-safer-communities-act/", "Cornyn Touts Lifesaving Success of Bipartisan Safer Communities Act", "2026-07-15", "2026", "2026-07", "Republican", "Senate", "TX", "John Cornyn", "C001056", "www.cornyn.senate.gov", "cornyn", "https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 Earlier this week on the floor, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) highlighted the lifesaving success of his Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law four years ago last month, and held a colloquy with Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) to address some of the misconceptions about the legislation. Excerpts of Sen. Cornyn\u2019s remarks are below, and video can be found here.\n\nOn Investments in Mental Health and School Hardening:\n\n\u201cWhat [the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act] did do is made an historic investment in mental health and school safety and commonsense measures to prevent dangerous individuals from being a harm to themselves and others.\u201d\n\n\u201cTexas, like all the states, has received significant amounts of money, in the case of Texas, hundreds of millions of dollars, from this law \u2013 more than $312 million to date \u2013 to strengthen our mental health care and school hardening, to make it more difficult for violent individuals to attack soft targets like schools typically have been.\u201d\n\nOn Investments in Community Behavioral Health Clinics:\n\n\u201cThe BSCA, as it\u2019s called, also expanded certified community behavioral health clinics around the country, which has allowed mental health clinics to expand their coverage to include not only mental health but substance abuse disorders.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere are now more than 500 community-based mental health centers operating in 46 states.\u201d\n\nOn Red Flag Laws:\n\n\u201cOne of the things I heard most in the recent campaign I ran in was that we had passed a red flag law, which would make it possible for an aggrieved partner or spouse or family member or maybe even a neighbor to basically turn in somebody and have their firearms confiscated without due process of law.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe truth is, the BSCA actually makes it harder to implement red flag laws because you can\u2019t do so and access this money unless you enhance the due process protections that are necessary to protect what is a constitutional right.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe wanted to make sure that the funding that was available was available for crisis intervention programs, veterans courts, mental health courts, just to use a couple of examples, that did not have those red flag laws, while making sure those states that did could not gain access to this money unless they provided an enhanced due process procedure.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s false to argue that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act created an incentive for more states to pass new red flag laws, and the statistics bear it out. Only 4% of the total money appropriated were obligated to red flag-related activities.\u201d\n\nOn Mandatory Wait Periods:\n\n\u201cAnother misconception I heard on the campaign trail or saw on social media was that somehow, we created a mandatory waiting period before somebody could access a firearm if they were going into a store to purchase it for those under 21. Once again, this is false.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf a person\u2019s record includes disqualifying criminal convictions or mental health adjudications, it shouldn\u2019t matter whether it occurred a day before their 18th birthday, and what the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act allowed law enforcement officials to do is to go back and look at those juvenile records.\u201d\n\nOn Straw Purchases and Firearm Trafficking:\n\n\u201cThis leads me to another important provision in the BSCA, which gives the Department of Justice tools to prosecute individuals for straw purchases.\u201d\n\n\u201cStraw purchases are the primary way that criminals and illegal aliens arm themselves, and the Trump administration has used these new criminal provisions enacted in the BSC[A] to target cartel members.\u201d\n\n\u201cBefore BSCA, the only penalty a criminal faced for a straw purchase was lying on their firearms transaction of minor offense, which many prosecutors would not bother to pursue.\u201d\n\n\u201cNow, because of this law, the Department of Justice has a tool to combat cartel violence and prosecute individuals who engage in firearms trafficking.\u201d\n\nOn His Legacy of Bipartisanship:\n\n\u201cWorking together with Senator Tillis, Senator Sinema, and Senator Murphy, we made sure we passed a law which actually would invest in mental health resources to identify individuals who were suffering before they became a danger to themselves and others.\n\n\u201cWe literally made the single largest investment when we passed this law four years ago in community-based mental health care and made our schools safer for all of our children, so they can focus on why they are in school in the first place \u2013 to learn \u2013 and parents don\u2019t have to worry at home about, \u2018Is my son or my daughter going to be safe?\u2019 all the while protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.\u201d\n\n\u201cAs I reflect back on my time here in the United States Senate, there are a few legislative accomplishments I\u2019ve made that have helped the people of Texas and our country at large \u2013 at least I hope that\u2019s the case \u2013 but out of all of these, the BSCA was one of the most critical in tangibly making the country safer for families and children.\u201d", 1, "2026-07-16T07:21:44Z", "2026-07-16T07:23:13Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-touts-lifesaving-success-of-bipartisan-safer-communities-act/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.5281587839126587, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}