[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 123 (Wednesday, July 14, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4882-S4883]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Gun Violence

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, my colleagues, it is not a coincidence 
that in 2020, gun sales in this country spiked by 40 percent. It is an 
extraordinary increase in gun sales. And homicides in this country 
increased by 30 percent. Violent crime is increasing in the country. 
You can't miss that if you turn on the news at night.
  And there can be no doubt that our Nation's gun laws--the loosest and 
most loophole-ridden in the Nation--are a primary contributor to this 
spike in gun crime.
  I want to spend just a few minutes this afternoon making sure that 
all of my colleagues understand that if we want to do something about 
violent crime in this country, then you cannot continue to close your 
eyes to the fact that we are allowing criminals all across this country 
to traffic dangerous weapons that are being used in gun homicides.
  First, let's burst the bubble of the gun lobby. Their primary 
argument is that more guns keep people safer. Well,

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that is not true. It has never ever been true. Study after study tells 
you what your common sense should already tell you. In fact, one study 
makes it very plain. On a nearly one-for-one basis, the more guns you 
have in your community, the more crime you are going to have.
  One study said this. What they found was that for communities that 
saw a 1-percent increase in gun ownership--guess what they also saw. A 
corresponding 1-percent increase in gun homicides. Thus, it should 
surprise no one that as the number of guns increase in this country, 
the number of gun crimes increase in this country.
  Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. But, again, you don't have 
to surge deep into the data to understand why. Let me give you just one 
example.
  A family I am pretty close to in Hartford, CT, a young man named 
Shane Oliver was shot years ago right down the street from where I live 
in the capital city. And he was in an argument with some young men 
about things they said about his girlfriend, who happened to be with 
him. It just so happened that there was an illegal gun sitting in the 
front seat of one of these cars. An argument over a girl that in any 
other high-income nation in the world would have, at worst, resulted in 
some punches being thrown. In this neighborhood in Hartford, CT, it 
resulted in a gun homicide.
  Shane Oliver doesn't live on this Earth any longer. He was taken from 
his parents, Pastor Sam Saylor and his wife Janet, when he was 20 years 
old because there was an illegal gun that just happened to be sitting 
in the front seat of a car. In almost any other country in the world, 
there is not a gun sitting in the front seat of another 20-year-old's 
car in the middle of Hartford, CT. Access to guns means more gun crime.
  But here is the other problem. We know there has been a 40-percent 
increase in gun sales. But those aren't just the sales that are 
reported to the criminal background check system. What we know is that 
somewhere around 20, 30 percent of all gun sales in this country don't 
happen with a background check attached to it. Those are gun sales that 
very often are going straight to criminals and straight to gun 
traffickers.
  So if there has been a 40-percent increase in background check 
transfers, there has likely also been a 40-percent increase in the 
number of guns that have been transferred to criminals and transferred 
to gun traffickers, the people who are selling them to the folks who 
are going to use them in gun violence.
  Here is a study out of New York. The New York AG's office recently 
reviewed aggregate gun trace information for about 5 years, and what 
they found was that 74 percent of the recovered guns in New York--
normally recovered because they were used in a crime--came with a known 
source State that wasn't New York. That is interesting, right?
  Three-quarters of the guns that are being used in crimes in New York 
aren't being bought in New York. There is a reason for that. You have 
to go through a background check in New York if you want to buy a gun. 
And if you are a criminal, you can't get a gun in New York at a gun 
store because they have background checks and because they don't have 
internet sales or gun show sales without background checks either.
  What the AG's office also found was that half of the guns that came 
from outside of New York came from six States--all six States with 
really weak gun laws--meaning there is this very intentional iron 
pipeline of guns in this country coming from States with no universal 
background checks, places where gun traffickers can go and buy guns at 
gun shows or online, and then bring them to States like New York or 
Connecticut or New Jersey and sell them on the black market.
  And what we also know is that there is a really short period of time 
between when these guns are being purchased and when they are being 
used in crimes, which shows an intentionality, which shows a very clear 
commercial market around the purchase of guns in places without 
background checks, the sale of those guns to potentially violent 
individuals, and the commission of crimes.
  Of the 1 million crime guns that were traced in this country between 
2015 and 2019, more than one-third were used in a crime within just 3 
years of their initial retail sale. This short time-to-crime timeline 
is a strong indication that these guns were purchased with the intent 
to divert them for criminal use.
  So every year that goes by that we choose, as a Congress, to not 
close these loopholes, to not simply say that if you are going to buy a 
gun on a commercial market in the United States, you just have to prove 
you are not a gun trafficker, is another year that we essentially 
endorse and facilitate the murder of thousands and thousands of 
Americans.
  And there is a clear connection between this increase in gun sales 
and this increase in criminal activity. Why? Because along with those 
legal gun sales come all sorts of gun sales that do an end around on 
the background check system.
  Now, thank goodness President Biden is doing something about this 
because there is a new loophole that criminals are taking advantage of, 
the ghost gun loophole. In California, today, 30 percent of the 
confiscated guns are unserialized. Think of that. Thirty percent of the 
guns being confiscated in California today by the ATF have no serial 
number on them. That is largely because of this new phenomena of ghost 
guns that are assembled from a kit, not guns that are purchased at a 
store
  In Connecticut, a convicted felon who couldn't have bought a gun at a 
gun store in Connecticut because he is a convicted felon used a ghost 
gun to shoot his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son 
before turning the gun on himself. People who know they can't buy guns 
in gun stores or online in a place like Connecticut that has universal 
background checks are now assembling ghost guns and committing crimes.
  The Biden administration is taking action, but so should we. I come 
to the floor to share this with my colleagues because our constituents 
are concerned about the rising rate of gun homicides in this Nation. 
They expect us to do something about it. And I am not saying that there 
is only one solution. I am not saying that changing our gun laws is the 
only step that we should take to try to do something about the rising 
rates of gun homicides in this country. There is a longer story as to 
why people have become so desperate as to resort to gun violence in 
order to mediate disputes or to project power.
  But the prevalence of so many more guns in our country today than 
just a year ago, the prevalence of so many more illegal guns due to 
intentional choices made by this body is a big part of the story. And I 
hope that we will be able to bring before this body bipartisan 
legislation that will close those background check loopholes very soon 
to give this body a chance to do something about the rising rates of 
gun violence in this country.