[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 181 (Tuesday, November 7, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7035-S7036]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Gun Violence
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we are grieving yet again today another
horrific mass shooting in a church in Texas--over 25 dead, others still
clinging to life. We were barely past our stage of grief as more than
50 people were shot dead and 500 were injured at a country music
concert in Las Vegas. Of course, every single night in this country,
parents and brothers and sisters go to bed having lost their loved
ones, and 90 people die every day from guns in this country.
I just think it is worth stating that this happens nowhere else other
than in the United States. This is not inevitable. This is not
something that we should accept. We are not impotent or helpless to try
to change the scope of tragedy that is crippling for families that have
to go through this.
I want everyone to take a quick look at this pretty simple chart. The
United States has more guns and more gun deaths than any other
developed country. It is not close, we are not even in the neighborhood
of any of our other G-20 competitor nations. While the President told
us the other day that this is a mental illness problem, one cannot
explain this outlier status through a story of mental illness because
none of these other countries have any lower rate of mental illness.
There are just as many people who are mentally ill in these countries
as there are in our country.
We cannot explain it by the attention we pay to mental illness. We
spend more money on treating mental illness than these countries do.
This isn't a mental illness problem. We have to do better in treating
people who have psychological disorders in this country, but the reason
that we are an outlier nation when it comes to the number of gun deaths
and the epic scale of our mass tragedies is explained by something
else.
Here is a quick story. This graphic shows the States that have
background check requirements on all gun sales in the private sector,
and here are the States that have no background check laws beyond those
that are required in Federal law. It is a fundamentally different story
when it comes to gun-related homicides. In the States that have
background check laws, the average rate of homicide is substantially
lower--substantially lower--than in States that haven't background
check laws. That is because in this country, with the loosest, most lax
gun laws in the industrialized world, private citizens are able to get
their hands on weapons that are designed not for hunting and not for
shooting for sport but to kill. These tactical assault-style weapons
are being used over and over in these mass tragedies, and more people
end up in harm's way.
Smarter gun laws--just making sure that the right people have guns,
not the wrong people--lead to less gun deaths. It is time for us to
admit that this is a uniquely American problem and that it deserves our
attention rather than our silence, which has been our response every
single session that I have been a Member of Congress.
This poster shows but a few of the faces that have been lost to gun
violence in this country. My small town of Sandy Hook is a broken
community. It is a beautiful, wonderful community, but it is a broken
community. The ripples of grief that come with losing that number of
children--beautiful children--all at one time never really gets
repaired. That small community in Texas, Sutherland Springs, will
suffer that same fate. It will be a community that will not ever truly
repair itself, having lost so many beautiful people at one moment. You
can't rewind the clock.
It is increasingly impossible for me to continue to go back to
Newtown, CT, and tell the people of that community that even after mass
murder after mass murder in this country, at a scale that occurs in no
other Nation, our response as a body is to do nothing. It is a level of
callousness that is frankly unexplainable to the victims of this
violence, and this macabre club of families that have had to deal with
the consequences of gun violence is getting bigger and bigger and
bigger.
Why? Because the number of people who die by guns is not going down.
It is not leveling off. It is exploding. Every year, more people--not
less people--are killed by guns in this country, and it seems to be the
only problem in which there is zero interest in this body to solve.
When a terrorist plows into civilians with a truck in New York City,
Republicans in this body are talking about policy change within hours,
but after somebody walks into a school or a church or a shopping mall,
we are told that there has to be a restraining order on policy debate
for days. It is ridiculous, and it is offensive to the families who
have gone through this.
So, let's just for a moment set aside the issues that I will admit
are unlikely to come up for a vote in this body between now and the end
of this session. I think it is unbelievable that universal background
checks, supported by 90 percent of Americans, can't get a vote here. I
don't think there is another issue like that in the American public,
where 90 percent of Americans agree on something and Congress can't
even conceive of getting it done.
The only place where background checks is controversial is in the
Congress. Every single gun owner I talk to
[[Page S7036]]
in my State wants to make sure that criminals and people who are
seriously mentally ill can't buy guns.
Similarly, let's admit what is happening here. It is not a
coincidence that the same kind of weapon is used every single time in
these shootings. These are copycat shootings in which people see the
kind of destruction that comes with an AR-15-style weapon, and they use
it again in order to maximize the lethality.
Wake up. Wake up to the reality that these weapons are being used to
murder with speed and power, and the killers are watching what happens
in Sandy Hook, what happens in Texas, what happens in Orlando, what
happens in Las Vegas, and they are repeating the process. They are
replicating the weapon. They shouldn't be in the hands of civilians.
You can have plenty of fun hunting without an AR-15 or AR-15-style
weapon. So let's set aside universal background checks and assault
weapons for a moment. I get the politics of this place. I understand
those are unlikely to pass.
Why, then, can't we work on the things that we know we agree on? I
have listened to dozens of Republicans in the House and the Senate
claim that they are for making real the prohibition on automatic
weapons. People shouldn't have fully automatic weapons in this country.
Nobody should be able to do what that guy did at an upper story window
in a hotel in Las Vegas, and the law that we all passed is being
ignored by companies that are selling these aftermarket modifications
that turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons. The company
that sold the modification took it off the market, but only for a
couple of weeks. They are back to selling bump stocks again because we
have signaled that we are not going to do anything about it.
It is not enough to just tell the ATF to do it. Why? Because the law
is vague. The ATF said it was vague in 2010. All we have to do is
clarify it, but aftermarket modifications that turn semiautomatic
weapons into automatic weapons shouldn't be legal. It seems we have
agreement on that because I have listened to many Republicans saying
they are willing to take that step. Let's take it and stop talking
about it. Put legislation on the floor that says you cannot have an
automatic weapon in this country. Let's do it. We agree on it.
I didn't agree with the President yesterday when he said it is a
mental illness problem, but similarly we could work together to make
sure that people who are seriously mentally ill don't buy weapons. That
is the second noncontroversial policy proposal on which we could work
together. Let's just admit we are going the wrong way, not the right
way.
Earlier this year, Republicans passed a piece of legislation that
allowed for 75,000 people in this country who have serious mental
illness to be able to get off the list of prohibited purchasers and
start buying guns again. These are people who were judged to be so
mentally ill that they couldn't deposit a check. They were given
conservator status for Social Security purposes. These are people who
were so mentally ill, so limited in their cognitive abilities that they
couldn't take a Social Security check and deposit it. Those people were
prohibited from buying guns. This Congress passed a law earlier this
year to say that those people who can't deposit a check should be able
to go buy an assault weapon.
If we are serious about trying to stop people with mental illness
from getting weapons, let's work together on that instead of moving
backward.
Finally, it is an open secret that the existing background check
system is broken. Let's not pretend we just woke up yesterday in
amazement that the records of people who are seriously mentally ill or
have been convicted of crimes aren't ending up on the background
checklist.
I am holding in my hand the data that is available to every single
one of us about the records that are being uploaded onto the background
check system. For the Department of Defense, it is a whole bunch of
zeros. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force--zero, zero, zero, zero, zero,
zero, zero.
Similarly, States aren't doing their part either. Connecticut
uploaded 363,000 felony records onto the NICS system over the course of
2016. Colorado uploaded 10 felony records in 2016. New York uploaded
57,000 domestic violence records in 2016. North Carolina uploaded 261.
There weren't 261 people in North Carolina who were convicted of
domestic violence crimes in 2016; it is just that only 261 people went
up on the list. Many other States, like the Department of Defense, have
zeros in all of these columns. Many States are uploading no records
onto the system.
Now, admittedly, NICS tries to get those records through other means
when States don't give it to them, but it is an open secret that the
NICS system is broken. Congress at least tried to make some changes.
After the Virginia Tech shooting, Congress did pass a NICS improvement
bill, but it has not worked. It gave the Department of Justice the
power to withhold Federal funding if States don't upload records.
Despite the fact that there are a handful of States that have uploaded
no records to NICS--zero--no State has been penalized under that 2007
law. That is not a Republican or a Democratic problem. The Obama
administration didn't penalize States, and Republican Presidents didn't
penalize States. Why don't we work together on that?
A couple of years ago, the House passed additional funding to help
States, other jurisdictions, upload records. Why don't we find a way to
work together to at least make the existing background check system
work?
This feeling of helplessness that people have in this country, this
feeling of impotence that nothing can be done to change the trajectory
of violence in this country, the regular scroll across the bottom of
your TV screen telling you news of the latest mass shootings where
little kids and senior citizens are being gunned down in churches and
schools--that sense of helplessness isn't real; it is a fiction, an
invention of the gun lobby designed to make this place feel as if there
is nothing that can be done in order to make sure that they can
continue to make these obscene amounts of profits. There are things we
can do.
I understand that despite the popularity of background checks with
the public, we are probably not going to get a vote on that, but let's
work together to make sure that automatic weapons can't be in the hands
of civilians. Let's make real the very simple premise that seriously
mentally ill people shouldn't be able to buy guns. Let's fix the
background check system so that, as Republicans tell us over and over
again, at least we can enforce existing law. There are ways that we can
stop this slaughter, and I don't know how we live with ourselves, how
we sleep at night as a body if, in the face of these massacres, we
don't even do the stuff we all agree on.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.