[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.

[[Page S1513]]

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

[[Page S1514]]

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.