[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 85 (Wednesday, May 18, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2557-S2559]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Gun Violence

  MR. MURPHY. Mr. President, the conventional wisdom is that one of the 
adaptations that helped humans separate ourselves from all other 
species is this--the opposable thumb. The theory goes that the 
transformation of the thumb, able to operate by itself independently 
from the rest of our fingers, allowed humans to be able to manipulate 
objects with a level of precision and dexterity that was previously 
unseen in the animal kingdom, and this newly nimble hand allowed humans 
to, for instance, more easily catch fish and open fruit, pull out the 
seeds, this newfound bounty of fats and proteins. It vaulted the human 
brain into developmental overdrive.
  But about 10 years ago, biologist David Carrier, a longtime student 
of the evolution of the human hand, proposed a different theory. What 
if the primary utility of the opposable thumb was not to do this, but 
instead this. The ability to tuck your thumb into the middle of your 
four fingers immediately gave humans a more effective fighting tool--
important, since we lacked tusks or fangs or claws like other animals.
  Maybe the development that mattered most to human development was the 
one that allowed us to become more effective fighters not just with 
predators but with ourselves because from the beginning, as a species, 
humans have been drawn to violence. In fact, there are few species, few 
mammals, that are more violent than humans.
  There is a really interesting study of intraspecies violence, meaning 
when you conduct a violent act against another member of your species, 
and these researchers looked at over 1,000 mammals.
  What is interesting is that 60 percent of mammals actually have zero 
intraspecies violence--bats and whales, they never attack each other. 
That tells you something, in and of itself; that it is not endemic to 
mammals to be violent.
  But what the data showed is that right at the top of that list of 
those 1,000 species, when it came to the rates of intraspecies 
violence--humans.
  Biologists trace our violence back to our earliest days. Without 
those tusks or fangs, humans could really only survive by grouping 
ourselves tightly together. We were quickly rewarded socially and 
materially for joining up in groups.
  But with resources scarce in the early human world to survive, you 
had to find a group, and then you had to defend it--defend it against 
other humans who were competing with you for those same resources.
  Intertribal violence was epidemic in this world in the early days of 
humans. In the bronze age, estimates suggest that one out of every 
three humans

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died a violent death at the hands of another human.
  Records suggest that in pre-Columbian America, as many as one out of 
four Native Americans died violently. The primary reason? Humans have 
an in-group bias. To survive in those early days, we needed to group 
ourselves tightly together and view with fear and skepticism members of 
other outside groups who were competitors for those scarce resources.
  And centuries and centuries of human development have hardwired this 
in-group bias, this anxiety about out groups into our genetics.
  One 2012 study determined that today, when an individual first meets 
a person who is perceived to be outside of one's defined social group, 
individuals demonstrate immediate, almost automatic instinct of anxiety 
and a surge of intention to act on that anxiety. It is not conscious; 
it is genetic.
  And so if humans are hardwired to view out-group members as 
suspicious and to act on those suspicions, sometimes violently, then 
America was destined, by design, to be an abnormally violent place.
  Now, why do I say that?
  First, let's just be totally honest with ourselves. Our Nation was 
founded through the use of mass-scale violence. There are lots of 
people who are trying to erase these parts of our history as if there 
is some weakness in admitting the truth about our past. That is 
ridiculous. We should just tell the truth about our history, and the 
truth is that we exterminated Native Americans in order to gain control 
of this land. We enslaved millions of Africans and used daily epidemic 
levels of violence--beatings, whippings, lynchings--to keep these 
people enslaved. From the start, we were a nation bathed in violence, 
and we became a little immune, a little anesthetized to violence in 
those early days.

  And our decision to build a melting pot of ethnicities and races and 
religions--it is our genius, right? It is our superpower as a nation. 
It is why we catapulted the rest of the world to economic and political 
dominance, but it also set us up as a nation with built-in rivalries, 
with easily defined groupings and easily exploited suspicions of those 
who aren't part of your group.
  This combination--epidemic levels of violence in our early days that 
continued throughout our history and built-in tensions between easily 
defined groups--ensured that America would be a place with a higher 
tolerance for and a higher risk of violence.
  OK. That is the end of the history lesson, but it is important to set 
this frame because this generation, our generation of Americans--we 
inherited this history. We can't do anything about that. We were born 
into and became citizens of a nation with a past--a past that does make 
us a little bit more prone to violence than other places.
  The question really is simply this: What are we going to do? Do we 
acknowledge this lean toward violence and take steps to mitigate it? 
That, of course, would be the commonsense approach.
  Instead, we have done the opposite. Throughout American history, 
hateful, demagogic leaders have found political capital to be gained by 
playing upon people's instinct to fear others who aren't part of their 
group--again, so easy in a multicultural America. From Orval Faubus to 
Richard Nixon, to Donald Trump, there is an ugly tradition in American 
politics of leaders trying to drum up irrational fears of Blacks or 
immigrants or Muslims, gay people or Hispanics or Jews. Racism, 
xenophobia, homophobia--they have all been tools of leaders who seek to 
build followings by convincing people to organize around their fear or 
hatred of others.
  The Buffalo shooter's manifesto is a tribute to this tradition, but 
he is not alone. The FBI's latest hate crimes report shows a dramatic 
spike in this country in crimes of bigotry and racism. Most alarming 
was a 40-percent increase in 2020 in hate crimes against Black 
Americans, foreshadowing the Buffalo attack.
  And this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The most visible 
political figure in America--Donald Trump--has spent the last decade 
relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate. His 
campaign rollout in 2015 was centered around hyping the threat to 
America from Mexican immigrants. His most significant campaign policy 
proposal was to ban all people from the country who practice a certain 
religion.
  There is a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the 
increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican 
colleagues don't use the same terminology, the same language that Trump 
does, but they know the danger he poses to this Nation. They know that 
his movement is egging on violence, and they do nothing about it. They 
still accept him as the leader of the party, when they had a chance to 
get rid of him after January 6. Republicans go to Florida to kiss the 
ring. They appear on FOX shows that spread this message. They empower 
the message.
  Knowing America's natural predilection toward violence, Republicans 
could have chosen to embrace leaders who seek to unite us, who would 
choose to push back against this tendency for Americans to be wary of 
each other. Instead, they did the opposite, and we are paying a price.
  The other way that our Nation could have chosen to mitigate our 
violent instincts is to make sure that when American violence does 
occur, it does the least damage possible. This is commonly referred to 
in public health circles as harm reduction. If you can't completely and 
totally prevent the harm, then make sure that it is glancing rather 
than catastrophic.
  Instead, America, once again, has adopted the opposite strategy--a 
strategy of harm maximization. We are, as I have told you, a 
historically violent nation. We know this. And instead of trying to 
mitigate for this history, we choose to arm our citizenry to the teeth 
with the most dangerous, the most lethal weapons imaginable, to make 
sure that when conflict does occur, it ends up with as many people 
dying as possible. That is a choice that we have made.
  The jumping-off point in the choice was in the mid-19th century, when 
Hartford, CT, inventor Samuel Colt built the first repeating revolver, 
allowing Americans to hide an incredibly lethal weapon in their coat 
pocket. All of a sudden, drunken street corner arguments, which used to 
result in a few awkward punches thrown, became deadly. And nearly every 
other country in the high-income world at this point, in the mid-1800s, 
saw this danger, and so they decided to regulate the handgun and the 
weapons that came after to make sure that those arguments stayed fist 
fights rather than shootouts.
  But America took the other path. We let these weapons spread across 
the Nation. And then, as much more deadly guns were developed for the 
military, our Nation decided to go its own way again and let citizens 
own and operate these weapons too.
  The result is, of course, a nation that is awash in guns, with no 
comparison--no comparison--in the high-income word. We have more guns 
in this country on our streets than human beings, than American 
citizens. So it is no wonder that in this Nation, everyday arguments 
seamlessly turn into gunfights, passing suicidal thoughts result in 
lives ended, and hateful racists can kill efficiently by the dozens.

  I think about September 14, 2012, all the time. That is the day that 
a gunman, armed with an assault weapon and 30-round magazines, walked 
into Sandy Hook Elementary School and in less than 5 minutes, killed 20 
kids and 6 educators. Think about that. The military weapons that this 
guy was able to own legally killed 26 people in under 5 minutes. The 
gun he used was so powerful that not a single child who was shot 
survived. Those bullets moved so fast, so lethally through their little 
bodies, it just tore them to shreds.
  But on that same day in China, a similarly deranged young man entered 
a similarly nondescript school and attacked almost the identical number 
of people, but in that Chinese classroom, every single one of those 23 
people who that man attacked survived. Why? Because in China the 
attacker had a knife, not a military-grade assault weapon.
  Like I said, I wish this weren't true, but our Nation has, from the 
jump, been more violent than other countries. I can't, you can't, none 
of us can erase this history. And I come to the floor today to be 
honest about the parts of the American story that lead to these high 
levels of violence that we

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can control and the parts that we can't control. It is up to us whether 
we want to spend every hour of every day trying to mitigate this 
predilection toward violence or whether we want to choose to exacerbate 
it.
  Fueling the kind of racist, hateful, fear-your-neighbor demagoguery 
practiced by Donald Trump exacerbates American violence. Doing nothing 
year after year about the flow of illegal and high-powered weapons into 
our streets exacerbates American violence. These are choices we are 
making.
  Kids living in fear that their classroom is the next one to get shot 
up, that is not inevitable; that is a choice. Black shoppers looking 
over their shoulder, wondering whether this is the day that they die, 
that doesn't have to be our reality; that is a choice.
  We can look into the flames of American violence, this fire that has 
been burning since our inception, and we can choose to douse the fire 
or we can choose to continue to pour fuel on top of it.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Michigan.
  (The remarks of Ms. STABENOW pertaining to the introduction of S. 
4257 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, I yield the floor.