[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.