[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 36 (Wednesday, February 27, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1512-S1514]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Bipartisan Background Checks Bill
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, later today, the House of Representatives
will pass a proposal that will be supported by 95, 97 percent of
Americans.
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This is a proposal to make sure anybody in this country who wants to
buy a gun in a legitimate transaction has to go through a background
check--a background check that in 90 percent of the cases takes less
than 5 minutes of time. That background check will assure that only
people who should be buying guns and owning guns will be buying and
owning guns--people who don't have violent criminal histories and
people who don't have histories of serious mental illness. It is a
popular proposal. It is an impactful proposal. It will save thousands
of lives all across this country.
I have come down to the floor to just remind my colleagues as to why
this is so important, and I want to tell a quick story to try to put a
little meat on the bone when it comes to this conversation we are
having about the importance of making sure people go through background
checks before they buy weapons.
Mr. President, 2008 to 2012 was a period of time in this country's
history where violence was declining. Homicides were declining. Gun
murders were declining. They were declining across the country.
Specifically during that period of time, they were declining in the
Midwest. Yet there was one State that stood out as a curious outlier
during that period of time, and that was the State of Missouri.
In the State of Missouri, there was a dramatic jump during this
period of time in gun homicides. In fact, it happened right away after
2007. In 2008 and 2009, about 50 to 60 to 70 additional people every
year were being murdered with guns inside Missouri. A researcher from
Johns Hopkins went to try to figure out why this was, and I think it is
important to tell that story on the floor today.
Let me give a little historical context first. During the Civil War,
Missouri was one of the most violent, most dangerous places in the
country because there were these outlaws, these renegades of
Confederates who were out in the bush--they call them the
bushwhackers--who were doing regular battle with Union troops. It was
one of the first instances of true, sustained guerilla warfare in this
Nation. When the Civil War was over, they didn't go home. They had been
brutally put down by the Union, but they stuck, and they formed their
own smaller criminal enterprises.
We know about this because Jesse James and his brother Frank were
amongst those who made their name as bushwhackers fighting the Union
and then turned into criminals who robbed stage coaches and banks and
trains.
To combat this post-Civil War continuation of violence, Missouri
decided to change its firearms laws, and it started with a crackdown on
the ability of individuals to conceal weapons. It extended to a change
in the Constitution to make it perfectly clear that Missouri
politicians had the ability to limit who could own guns and who
couldn't.
Eventually, a provision got passed that said that in order to own a
handgun, you had to get a permit from your local authority. As time
went on, that permit came to include a background check, so that if you
wanted to own a gun in Missouri, you had to go and get a background
check. You had to prove you did not have a serious criminal history or
a serious history of mental illness.
What happened in 2007 was that, very quietly, that provision got
repealed. It was part of a much louder effort to repeal a whole host of
gun laws in Missouri. Missouri kind of became the epicenter of the
NRA's focus in the 2000s. It was this Southern--semi-Southern State
that still had pretty tough gun laws, and the NRA went all in and had
their annual convention in St. Louis and spent millions of dollars
trying to elect folks who would sign laws they were pushing through the
legislature. In 2007, they finally got their way. They got all these
laws that had been passed since the Civil War repealed. One of them was
the law that required you to get a background check before you could
buy a gun.
The researcher from Johns Hopkins sort of looked at all these laws,
controlled for all sorts of other factors, and came to the conclusion--
you should read the paper; it is very well done--that it was this
provision which removed the background check that led to this dramatic
spike in violence. He has all sorts of interesting data to show why
that is. All the other violent crime in Missouri stayed flat from 2008
to 2012, but gun crimes spiked. All of a sudden, guns bought in
Missouri were being used in crimes all over the region. Other States
started to report an increase--a curious, sudden increase--in crime
guns that were bought in Missouri. Well, guess why. It was because all
of a sudden, you didn't have to get a background check if you wanted to
buy a gun in Missouri. All of a sudden, criminals and people with
serious mental illnesses could get guns through gun shows and internet
sales--transactions on the private market--without that background
check.
I tell this story because I hear opponents of this bill in the House
saying: This isn't meaningful. It won't work. These mass shootings
weren't perpetuated with weapons that were bought without background
checks.
Well, that is true. This one public policy intervention won't stop
every single bad thing that happens in this country. But the data is
the data, and it shows us that States that have background checks have
dramatically lower rates of gun crime than States that don't have them.
A little bit earlier than the changes made in Missouri, my State of
Connecticut made the opposite change. My State of Connecticut made a
change to go from being a non-background check State to a background
check State. We put in a local permit that came with a background check
requirement. So even if you bought your gun outside of a bricks-and-
mortar gun store, you had to get a permit, and that permit required you
to get a background check.
Well, that same researcher went to Connecticut, ran all the numbers,
and found out that in Connecticut, after that change was made, gun
murders dropped by 40 percent. They increased in Missouri by about 25
percent and decreased in Connecticut by about 40 percent--and again
controlling for all sorts of other factors that could explain those
changes.
So on both sides of the ledger, there is what I would tell you is
incontrovertible evidence that a State that has background checks is
going to end up having many fewer gun crimes than a State that doesn't
have them. The problem is, as we saw in and around Missouri, guns don't
respect borders, so when Missouri dropped its gun background check
requirement, those guns started moving into other States.
That is what happened in my State. The guns that are used to commit
crimes in our cities--the guns that are trafficked out of the back of
vans--aren't bought from Connecticut gun stores; they are bought by
criminals in other States because they know they can go to gun shows
and they can turn to internet sales in those other States and buy those
weapons.
The same thing happens as weapons move across our border. I have
heard an awful lot from this President about how dangerous Mexico and
Central America are. Well, there is some truth to that, but the guns
that are being used in those crimes are trafficked from the United
States of America, and the way they get to the southern border is
through States that don't have background check requirements.
Just go online and check out what people say who have been arrested
for gun trafficking. They tell you exactly how they did it. They go to
gun shows in Texas. They buy guns at unregulated gun shows in Texas,
and they take them back across the border and sell them in Central
America.
So we have all the evidence we need--empirical evidence, anecdotal
evidence--to pass this piece of legislation, but maybe the most
important reason that we should pass it, that we should take it up here
in the Senate when it passes the House later today, is that it is just
so darn popular. There really isn't anything else in America today that
is as popular as universal background checks. The minimum score is
about 90 percent. There is plenty of really good polling that says that
97 percent of Americans support universal background checks. Grandma
isn't that popular. Apple pie isn't that popular. There is nothing we
debate here that gets 97 percent on agreement other than the issue of
background checks.
So I am here on the floor today to try to fill in some of the details
on why this is so important and to implore my colleagues, once it
passes the House of Representatives, to bring it here. Obviously, I
would love to have a vote on
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the House bill, but I understand how this place works. We are going to
send a letter to Chairman Graham asking him to at the very least
convene a hearing on background checks in the Judiciary Committee.
We came to a conclusion here in the Senate as to a bipartisan
background checks proposal that could get 50 votes--in 2013--and I
would love to start that process again. But there is no reason not to
do it because all the evidence tells us that when we make sure that
only the right people buy guns, a lot less people die from gun crimes.
This is not controversial anywhere except for Washington, DC.
Everybody out there in the American public wants us to pass universal
background checks. Maybe some other interventions in this space are a
little bit more controversial, split folks a little bit more, but not
background checks. This thing is decided outside of the Senate Chamber
and the House Chamber. Popular in the public, deeply impactful, will
save thousands of lives--that is a triple we don't get very often here,
and we should take advantage of the opportunity.
Let me leave you with this: I convened a panel a couple of nights ago
to talk about the importance of background checks, and there were a
number of parents of those who were lost to gun violence. One of the
parents was from Sandy Hook. Another was a parent of a child who was
killed in Chicago, and she really wanted to make sure we knew what the
real impact of gun violence in America was. She wanted to make sure we
knew that the victims aren't just those who show up on the police
blotter; the victims are the parents and the brothers and the sisters
and the friends and the coworkers.
The average number of people who experience some diagnosable trauma
when somebody in their life is shot and killed is 20. So when you hear
the number that 100 people in the United States die every day from
guns--which is a number 10 to 20 times higher than in any other high-
income nation on a per capita basis--you have to understand that number
isn't really 100; that number is 20 times higher than that because the
people who have to live with that loss have to ask these questions: Why
did they shoot themselves? What do I do about that individual who shot
my son? How do I get over that combination of pain and anger? That is
hard to understand unless you have spent time with the mothers and the
fathers who will be dealing with this catastrophic, life-changing
trauma for the rest of the time they are on this Earth.
So that is why this is so serious to me. It is because we have an
answer for their pain--not an answer that will stop every gun crime in
this country but an answer that will result in thousands fewer people
dying. We know that because the evidence tells us that. And I can't
explain to these families--to that mother in Chicago--why something
that has been proven to work and is supported by 90 percent of
Americans can't get a vote or a debate in the Senate.
I will leave it at that for today. I hope that when this passes in
the House with a big bipartisan majority, we will take advantage of the
opportunity to get a big bipartisan majority here in the Senate. If the
Republican majority commits to starting that process, I guarantee that
will be the result.
I want to thank all of the people who made this possible in the House
today.
For the record, I have introduced a version of H.R. 8 here in the
U.S. Senate.
To Chairman Nadler, Mike Thompson, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader
Hoyer, and to their Republican cosponsors who helped bring it to the
floor--I thank them on behalf of all of the folks they will never know,
those lives they will save by their action today if we do the right
thing and take it up here in the Senate.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators
Leahy, Klobuchar, King, and Tester be recognized in the next 40 minutes
or so for a colloquy with me.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.