[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 102 (Monday, June 17, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4105-S4107]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Gun Violence

  Mr. MURPHY. Madam President and colleagues, this is a speech I have 
been thinking about giving for a long time. I think it is a speech 
somebody needs to give, but it is hard. There is some really awful 
stuff I am going to talk about, things that cut deep when we think 
about who we are, when we think about how we handle crises and 
emergencies, about the things we need to do as a human race to feel 
safe.
  I want to talk to you today about what happened on May 24, 2022--
almost 2 years ago--at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX. After 2 
years of review, investigation, hand-wringing, grief, and anger, we now 
have as full a picture of what happened that day as we ever will, and 
we need to talk about it because it is important.
  Here is what we know: 1 hour and 17 minutes after a gunman entered 
Robb Elementary School and opened fire on two classrooms full of 
children, 54 minutes after a school police officer got a call from his 
wife, who said that she had been shot in her classroom, 38 minutes 
after a 9-1-1 dispatcher told police there were confirmed victims in 
the classrooms, only then did a team of officers finally enter room 111 
at Robb Elementary School and kill the gunman--1 hour and 17 
excruciating minutes. The kids inside those classrooms--9, 10, 11 years 
old--and their teachers waited to be saved by the people whose job it 
was to keep them safe.
  The students in rooms 111 and 112 had prepared for this moment. They 
had practiced what they should do if something like this were to 
happen: Drop to the floor. Sit along the walls farthest from the door 
and the windows. Crouch under desks, countertops--anywhere you could be 
safe.
  They stayed silent--so silent that the officers on the other side of 
the door thought that there couldn't possibly be children inside. 
Surely, they would be crying out. But they were doing, in fact, exactly 
what they were told to do. They were doing their part.
  As the minutes went on, outside the classroom stood not 10 armed 
officers, not 50, not even 100. Outside the classroom and surrounding 
the school, 376 armed officers were present--outside the classroom.
  Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Ailyn Ramos hugged her friend Leann 
Garcia to stop her from screaming out in pain.
  Inside the classroom, Elsa Avila, a teacher in room 109, tried to 
stay conscious after a bullet ripped through her stomach. Her students 
whispered to her:

       Miss, we love you. You're going to be OK.

  They told each other:

       Don't let her go to sleep.

  Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Khloie Torres and Miah Cerrillo 
called 9-1-1, begging for help.
  Inside the classroom, Khloie and Miah's classmate Kendall Olivarez 
sobbed in pain as she lay stuck under their teacher, who had already 
been killed.
  As 33 students and 3 of their teachers spent an hour and 17 minutes 
trapped in a room with an active shooter, there were hundreds of armed 
adults who stood outside. Doing what? Well, they were doing the things 
that would naturally occur to you if you heard that a man with military 
weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition is just around the corner 
from you on a killing spree. They were scared. They were disorganized. 
They were panicked. They were frozen. There were good people amongst 
those 376, but they were all providing natural reactions given the 
circumstances. But that does not excuse their inaction. Of course it 
doesn't.
  The adults--the adults--in Uvalde had bought into this idea that more 
security, more men with guns in schools would keep those kids safe. In 
fact, the Uvalde School District placed so much faith in the ability of 
armed security to keep schools safe that it had its own school police 
department. But all of those men with guns didn't protect those kids. 
The opposite happened.
  How on Earth could this happen? How could there be 300 armed law 
enforcement officers doing nothing for so long as children called 9-1-
1, as parents ran to the school and begged to be allowed in? How could 
those officers wait 1 hour and 17 minutes when the entire point of 
having a school police department full of men with guns is to stop 
something like this from happening?
  Earlier this year, the Justice Department released a report to try to 
answer some of those questions. They spent 20 months reviewing hours of 
body cam footage, audio recordings, training logs. They interviewed 260 
people who were there that day. The final report paints a damning and 
infuriating picture of what went wrong, and I think it is important to 
talk about it because it shows how flawed this promise is--this promise 
that good guys with guns is all that is necessary to stop bad guys with 
guns.
  At 11:35, Sergeant Daniel Coronado heard gunfire and ran inside the 
school. Another round of shots grazed two officers who had been 
approaching the classrooms with him. One of those officers kept moving 
toward the classroom, but he turned back when realized that none of his 
colleagues had followed him.
  Again, this reaction from those initial police officers is 
understandable. There was a madman inside that classroom. Instinct 
tells you to run away, not to run toward danger.
  Then confusion set in--the second predictable element of an active 
shooter crisis. Sergeant Coronado relayed an unconfirmed report that 
the gunman was contained and had barricaded himself inside a classroom, 
leading officers to believe that they were dealing with a barricaded 
subject, not an active shooter. Active shooter training says rush into 
the classroom, but they didn't think it was an active shooter, so they 
didn't act with urgency.
  Eventually, they just couldn't continue to rationalize standing idle 
because it was a barricaded suspect. They continued to hear gunfire. 
They learned that one of the officers' wives was shot inside the 
classroom. They heard over their radios that there were victims. Common 
sense would have told them that there were kids inside these 
classrooms. Forty minutes into this massacre, there should have been no 
doubt what they were dealing with. This was an active shooter. This was 
the time to enter the classroom, but instead they continued to wait.
  Now, part of the confusion was that there was no clear command 
structure; there was no one to give orders. There were probably lots of 
men with guns who wanted to go in but were told that

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they couldn't. But there really was no excuse. At one point, the 
officers claimed that they needed keys, but they admitted not a single 
officer even walked up to the door to check if it was unlocked. Why? 
Because they all knew that inside that classroom was a young man 
equipped with military-style weaponry that could kill them--that would 
kill them the instant they opened that door.

  Finally, at 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the shooter entered the 
school, a team of officers breached the room and killed the gunman. Two 
children still had a pulse when they were rescued. Eva Mireles, the 
teacher whose husband was on the scene, died in an ambulance that never 
even left the school.
  One gunman, 376 armed officers--1 hour and 17 minutes of avoidable, 
indescribable horror; 19 children and 2 teachers dead--a colossal 
failure.
  So what does this tell us? What can we learn from this? Because we 
are commanded to learn something from these tragedies.
  I know human instinct. I know we have a biological inclination to 
want to fight fire with fire. So our first reaction, when we see the 
threat of a deranged young man with a gun, is to mirror that threat 
with our defensive reaction. If a gunman steps into a building where 
our kids are, we want them to be met with equal force: Confront a bad 
guy with a gun with a good guy with a gun.
  At some level, in here, I get that that makes sense. I understand 
this reaction, because I have felt it. I have had kids in these post-
Sandy Hook public schools for the last 12 years. And when we wrote the 
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most comprehensive gun 
legislation in 30 years, it made important changes to our gun laws and 
invested in mental health, but it also provided $300 million for school 
hardening. So I am on the record supporting putting more security in 
our schools.
  But in the wake of Uvalde and in the wake of all of this reporting, 
it is increasingly impossible to square this gut reaction so many of us 
understandably have with reality. It is time for me to admit that to 
myself. It is time for all of us to admit this publicly.
  In 1970, police officers were stationed in just 1 percent of 
America's public schools. By 1997, 22 percent had an officer onsite, 
and 43 percent in 2016. By 2019, the majority of schools had a police 
officer onsite. You can match almost every uptick with a high-profile 
school shooting.
  But despite this exponential increase in armed officers at schools, 
the shootings have not abated. They have increased in frequency. More 
guns and more police and more armed security in schools has done 
nothing to stop this trajectory.
  We should have seen this with our own eyes well before Uvalde. When 
the gunshots started at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 
Parkland, FL, the armed police at the school that day ran away and then 
argued in court that they had no legal obligation to protect those 
kids, only an obligation to protect themselves.
  But it is not just anecdotal evidence. A study of 179 school 
shootings between 1999 and 2019 found that there was no association 
between the presence of a police officer in a school and any reduction 
in the severity of violent shootings in those schools.
  When you really stop to think about this, it does make sense. A 
shooter with an AR-15 needs a minute or two to get off enough rounds to 
kill dozens. Even if the armed security officer does the right thing 
and runs to the gunfire--instead of the natural thing, running away 
from it--time is on the shooter's side. So it is not surprising that 
there is no evidence that more guns in our schools keep our kids safe.
  What tends to happen, frankly, when police officers populate our 
schools, is that ordinary school misbehaviors get criminalized, and 
kids, especially Black boys and disabled students, get arrested for 
things that used to be dealt with in the principal's office. The police 
in these schools don't end up stopping mass shootings. They just end up 
arresting a bunch of kids and ruining their lives.
  We can zoom out even further to consider this argument of whether 
more guns--or more good guys with guns--make our communities safer or 
less safe. If good guys with guns protected us from gun violence, you 
would expect States or communities with high rates of legal gun 
ownership to be safer, but they aren't.
  You can probably guess by now that the opposite is actually true. In 
places with high rates of legal gun ownership, there are more gun 
deaths than in places with low rates of gun ownership.
  There is a difference between what makes us feel safe and what 
actually makes us safer. The reality is this: More people with guns and 
more guns do not make our kids safer. That is an uncomfortable truth--I 
get it--because we want to believe that we can meet force with 
potential force, and everything will be okay.
  But there were 376 armed police officers and security outside that 
classroom in Uvalde. There were plenty of good guys with guns outside 
that classroom, some of them steps away from a shooting that was 
ongoing for an hour, and it did nothing for those kids. Frankly, it 
made the massacre harder to live with for so many of those parents 
because it exposed this fraud that told us that we can protect 
ourselves with more guns.
  This is a hard lesson to learn. After Uvalde and Parkland, Texas and 
Florida just doubled down on a failed strategy. They required more guns 
in our schools, despite no evidence that it works. In Tennessee, after 
the terrible Covenant School shooting, the State legislature went even 
further, arming teachers with guns.
  In the movies, a heroic lone good guy with a gun kills dozens of 
armed evildoers, but that is in the movies. That is fiction. That is 
not reality. A teacher with a gun isn't going to save our kids. 
Remember, the evidence tells us, over and over again, that in places 
with more guns, there are more gun deaths, not less.
  But amidst all of this bad news, amidst the failure to learn the 
lessons of Uvalde and Parkland, there is good news. There are policies 
that work. In States with gun safety laws--like universal background 
checks, safe storage, and red flag laws--fewer people die by guns.

  In the wake of the passage--the bipartisan passage--of the 2022 gun 
bill, gun crime is down. Urban gun murders have dropped by 12 percent 
from 2022 to 2023--the biggest 1-year drop in the history of the 
country. And 2024 is on pace for another record-setting drop in urban 
gun crime.
  And, this year, the pace of mass shootings is way down as well. 
Between January and May of this year, there were 29 percent fewer mass 
shootings compared to the same period of time in 2023.
  It is proof that when the primary focus of your efforts is to pass 
laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, instead of 
loading our communities up with guns, and putting money into 
communities to help get at the root causes of violence, you can save 
lives.
  What happened that day at Robb Elementary School is a disgrace. We 
will never understand--I will never understand--the grief and the pain 
of those parents who lost kids that day, who watched 376 armed officers 
wait an hour and 17 minutes to confront that gunman.
  What we can do--what we can do--is make a decision to not simply 
avert our eyes from what happened that day because it is what is 
easier, but instead study and learn from this tragedy.
  Flooding our schools and our communities with more guns won't solve 
the problem. It won't stop the next Uvalde. What will keep our kids 
safe is keeping guns--especially the most dangerous guns--out of the 
hands of dangerous people.
  Congress has the power right now to do something about it. We could 
start, for instance, by responding to last week's Supreme Court 
decision and passing legislation to ban the conversion of semiautomatic 
weapons into machine guns. Our kids would be safer, undoubtedly, if it 
was harder for a deranged psychopath to get their hands on a banned 
automatic weapon.
  The majority of Americans are on our side. They want Congress to act, 
to pass things like universal background checks, to ban bump stocks. 
They are sick of us learning the wrong lesson every time tragedy 
strikes. It is never too late for this time to be different.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Butler). The majority leader.

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