[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 77 (Thursday, May 8, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2828-S2830]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              GUN VIOLENCE

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I want to come to the floor today to talk 
about a success story but, potentially, a success story interrupted.
  Back in 2022, we all were shocked to watch news playing out during an 
afternoon that we were here, working in the Senate, of another mass 
shooting--this one of just unthinkable size and scope--in Uvalde, TX. I 
was actually sitting in the Presiding Officer's chair when I saw word 
of the shooting scroll across my smartphone screen.
  Gratefully, in the wake of that shooting, a group of us--Republicans 
and Democrats--were able to come together and set aside the differences 
that we had and still have on the issue of gun violence in this 
country. We decided not to argue about an assault weapons ban, for 
instance. Instead, we decided to work on finding the least common 
denominator, as we called it, and tried to find a set of commonsense 
changes to our gun laws and commonsense investments in our communities 
that would, hopefully, together, try to put a downward pressure on 
what, up until then, had been annual spiking rates of homicides and 
mass shootings.
  It is just true that, in this country, you are 10 times more likely 
to be shot in your school, in your neighborhood, at a movie theater 
than you are in any other high-income, developed nation. That is a 
choice. That is not bad luck. That is not happenstance. That is 
because, in America, we decide to have a ton of weapons in the hands of 
very dangerous people. We also don't spend enough time trying to unwind 
some of the reasons young people, in particular, get into lives of 
really risky and potentially violent behavior.
  So we came together in 2022, and we passed the Bipartisan Safer 
Communities Act. It was a big bipartisan vote. It wasn't close. The 
final tally was 65 to 33, with nearly two-thirds of the Senate voting 
in favor of this commonsense gun safety measure. It wasn't anything 
close to what I see as being necessary in order to tackle this epidemic 
in this country, but it was significant. It was five changes in gun 
laws: supporting State red flag laws; stopping domestic abusers from 
getting their hands on guns; putting in a short but meaningful waiting 
period when young people are hastily buying an assault weapon; making 
it easier for law enforcement to go after drug trafficking rings. It 
was five meaningful changes, but it was also a big investment, a big 
investment in the kind of services that can help interrupt violence.
  A lot of my Republican friends said: You know, we don't believe it is 
the guns. We think it is mental illness.
  Well, I don't agree, but this is how you put together a compromise. 
So we passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which included a 
landmark $14 billion investment, most of it in mental health, most of 
it directed toward kids' school-based mental health, but there were 
also significant investments in school safety--just hardening schools 
to make it harder for a shooter to get inside and community anti-gun 
violence initiatives, which is the work that local community groups are 
doing in North Carolina and Connecticut and all across the country to 
just try to wrap services around people who might be at risk of gun 
violence or to stop that cycle of violence once the first shooting 
happens.
  So we passed this legislation, and we crossed our fingers. We said: 
Let's hope that we are right and that these changes in gun laws and 
these investments we are making in our communities will make a 
difference.
  Well, what happened after we passed that law was absolutely stunning: 
the biggest 2-year decline in gun violence in the history of recorded 
statistics in the United States of America. That is extraordinary. That 
is extraordinary. I am not going to sit here and claim that the entire 
reason was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but it was a big part 
of the reason because we did make it harder for bad people to get their 
hands on guns. We did deliver the kinds of services that are necessary. 
You are seeing this downward trajectory, but let me just put the 
numbers on it.

  In 2023, there were 659 mass shootings in America. In 2024, there 
were 500. That is a 24-percent, 1-year decline in mass shootings. That 
means that there were 160 mass shootings that didn't happen and 160 
communities that were not terrorized in 2024. And this bill had a lot 
to do with it. Overall gun deaths went down from 2023 to 2024 from 
19,000 to 16,700. That was a 12-percent reduction. We have never in 
this country's history seen 1-year declines in gun homicides in the 
neighborhood of 12 percent. Certain cities saw astronomical declines. 
In Hartford, we saw a 39-percent drop in homicides from 2023 to 2024. 
This year--this year, 2025--Hartford is on track to have the lowest 
recorded instances of gun violence--those are homicides and nonfatal 
shootings--since 2006. New Haven saw a 39-percent drop in homicides. As 
I think I said, overall, in Connecticut, we had 167 homicides in 2023. 
In 2024, we had 63. It is wild.
  This happened in Baltimore, and this happened in Chicago. In most of 
the major cities in this country and in rural areas as well, we saw 
this dramatic, dramatic decline. So it is just something to celebrate 
because it is not easy to get that kind of consensus. It is not easy to 
get that kind of consensus, and we should celebrate the fact that there 
are literally thousands of people--largely young men--who are alive 
today because of the bill that we passed.
  But this progress is in threat of being interrupted, and the reason 
is that the Trump administration has reversed course. I want to talk 
specifically about how they are undoing the progress of this bill, but 
their attempt to try to reverse the broader progress that we have made 
on reducing gun violence is pretty comprehensive. Let me just give you 
a handful of the ways in which the Trump administration is trying to 
make our communities less safe.
  First, they closed the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. This was 
something the Biden administration set up to try to better implement 
the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. This wasn't a terribly political 
office. It was just trying to coordinate all the work being done across 
Agencies to reduce violence in our communities. Trump would have taken 
this office in a different direction, but he didn't. He just shuttered 
it. There is no Office of Gun Violence Prevention anymore in the 
Federal Government.
  On March 20, the administration announced that they are going to 
start a process of restoring firearms rights to individuals who have 
had them taken away because they had serious criminal records. This is 
likely illegal.

[[Page S2829]]

There is an appropriations bill rider that says the ATF can't do this, 
but the message was sent: We actually think that dangerous people 
should be able to get their gun rights back.
  That same day, Trump's Department of Justice filed a motion in 
Federal court, trying to overturn a decision to say that silencers are 
not protected by the Second Amendment, trying to say that no State 
legislature could ban or regulate the use of silencers, and silencers 
are broadly used by killers, by criminals who are trying to hide the 
fact that they are engaged in criminal, lethal conduct.
  On April 7, the DOJ announced that it was repealing a policy from the 
Biden administration that said simply this: If you are a gun dealer and 
you are engaged in illegal conduct, we are going to pull your license, 
and we are not going to give you two or three or four shots. We are 
going to have a zero tolerance policy for gun dealers who are selling 
guns on to the black market. That is a policy most Americans would see 
as common sense, but the DOJ announced that it was going to let off the 
hook gun dealers who are violating the laws.
  Now, throughout the last 100 days, the Trump administration has been 
sending all sorts of signals that they are deprioritizing the work of 
the ATF. Most recently, on April 9, they announced that the Army 
Secretary would now be the acting head of ATF. This was basically 
telling ATF agents: We don't care about your work. We are not going to 
have a full-time ATF head. We are putting somebody with a big, other 
important job in charge of the ATF. You are not going to have any real 
supervision or direction.
  It was just a signal of the deprioritization of the enforcement of 
our gun laws that caused, the next day, the second highest ranking 
official at the ATF, who had served admirably for 35 years, to resign 
in protest.
  Then, maybe most unconscionably and most cruelly, just a few days 
ago, the ATF took down the memorial wall dedicated to victims of gun 
violence. I mean, there were names up there, tributes to moms and dads, 
brothers and sisters who had been killed in episodes of gun violence. 
That was really important to hundreds of families out there who knew 
that their loved ones' names were part of that wall. Now the wall comes 
down. For what? Just to send another signal that the administration 
doesn't care about attacking gun violence.
  But I really wanted to come to the floor today to talk about the two 
most important assaults that the Trump administration has made on our 
work to try to keep our communities safe. Those are the twin 
announcements that the administration made that they were going to end 
two of the key streams of funding for community groups in the 
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
  First, the administration announced it was ending $1 billion in 
grants under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to invest in school 
mental health and then that they were ending $800 million of DOJ grants 
to try to drive down violence through supporting community efforts to 
do that work.
  This makes no sense. I understand we have a difference. The President 
and I have a difference on what our gun laws should be. But there is 
consensus--I thought there was consensus--that we should support 
investment in mental health. I thought there was a consensus that we 
all believed that there were good community groups that were doing 
totally apolitical work, not related at all to gun laws, to try to 
interrupt cycles of violence.
  The reason that these numbers have been going down is not just the 
changes in gun laws. The reason that our communities are safer all 
across the country is that we are finally putting real money into 
school-based mental health, into children's mental health, and into the 
groups in our communities that are keeping kids alive.
  In Oakland, they have seen a stunning 32-percent drop in homicides, 
and it is a result of groups like Youth Alive!. This is a nonprofit 
that is working to prevent and disrupt the cycle of gun violence. So 
you go into a community, you go into a place where a shooting has 
happened, and you do work with the victim of that incident to make sure 
that it doesn't become a cycle of violence.
  These are often called hospital-based violence intervention programs. 
When there is a shooting, you have a social worker or a community anti-
gun violence worker that goes to the hospital. That is often when the 
communities are the most angry, the friends of that victim may be 
planning for revenge, and you do the work to stop that cycle of 
violence.
  It was working in Oakland. Youth Alive! was preventing gun violence. 
Last year, of the 113 clients they served, only 1 of them was injured a 
second time. Yet, in the middle of a 3-year $2 million grant that Youth 
Alive! was getting, it was suspended, terminated. They are going to 
have to lay off their staff. That program is being shut down in 
Oakland. And I will just tell you, I would bet you homicides are going 
to start going back up in Oakland.
  Baltimore has seen a similar massive decline in gun violence, a 43-
percent reduction since 2010--what a success story in Baltimore, one of 
the most violent communities in terms of rates of gun violence in the 
country, a 43-percent decline.
  Center for Hope is a group in Baltimore that provides prevention and 
healing services for children who have been the witnesses or victims of 
gun violence. They were getting, again, a $2 million grant to work with 
the victims of gun violence to try to heal those communities and, 
again, stop that cycle of retributive violence that often happens in 
places like Baltimore.
  Donald Trump cut their grant. So in the middle of the grant, they are 
losing $1.2 million, and they are going to have to lay off 7 employees.
  Center for Hope runs 6 of the city's 10 Safe Streets sites. These 
operate in the pockets of Baltimore where you see the most shootings. 
Because of these Center for Hope sites--these Safe Streets sites--
between 2023 and 2024, four of the sites run by the Center for Hope saw 
zero homicides. Now they are having to lay off people. Guess what is 
going to happen. Those shootings are going to go up again.
  We had to work really hard to find this consensus on a very difficult 
issue. It is illegal, what the President has done. He is not allowed, 
under the Constitution, to decide unilaterally to cancel spending that 
has been authorized and appropriated by Congress. So maybe the first 
and most important thing to say about what the President has done to 
cancel mental health grants and anti-violence grants is that it is 
illegal. He can't do it, and it is likely that a court will turn these 
grants back on.
  But it is also such bad policy. It is cruel and inhumane, but it is 
also illogical. We literally are seeing the fruits of the labor of 
these groups, and not just in saving a life or two. You are talking 
about a 30- and 40-percent reduction in violence in these cities. And 
what will happen is unmistakable. You stop funding these groups that 
are doing the mental health work in the schools, that are doing the 
anti-gun violence work, and these rates will start to go back up again.
  That is illogical, but it is cruel as well because what the President 
is doing, for instance, in cutting off the school mental health grants 
is that he is cutting off existing grants. It is not that he is 
announcing: I am not giving any new grants.
  There are schools all across this country that have set up new mental 
health clinics because of the grants they got. They were 5-year grants, 
and 1 or 2 or 3 years into those grants, Donald Trump is shutting those 
programs down. So there are literally going to be thousands of 
children--traumatized children, children with serious mental illness, 
with cycles and histories of abuse in their households--who have 
created this relationship with an adult--this adult who is helping them 
address their potential tendency to act out in violent ways due to 
their mental illness, their trauma. And one day, these kids are going 
to show up at school, and that adult is going to be gone. That trusted 
adult that had created that bond, that relationship that is helping 
that child, that is keeping that school safe--that relationship, that 
bond is destroyed because in cutting these grants off with no warning, 
there is no way, in the middle of a school year, for a school mental 
health clinic to find the money under the mattress.
  It is illogical. It is going to drive up gun violence rates. And it 
is cruel to

[[Page S2830]]

our poorest and most at-risk communities and to the kids--and to the 
kids--the traumatized kids, the kids with serious mental illness, the 
kids that we should think first about when we wake up in the morning.
  I guess the final thing to say is this: We are putting ourselves out 
of business. We are putting ourselves out of business. What is the 
point of passing a law by a 65-to-33 vote if the President of the 
United States can just ignore it? As I said, that is illegal, and the 
courts will likely tell him: You can't shut off the funding that we 
appropriated and authorized.
  This should matter to Republicans and Democrats. Every single one of 
my Republican colleagues worked really hard to get this job, worked 
really hard to become a U.S. Senator. Those of us who worked on these 
bipartisan pieces of legislation worked really hard to pass them. What 
is the point of running for the U.S. Senate, what is the point of 
working to forge this compromise if the President can just ignore it?
  By the way, if Donald Trump gets away with it, mark my words, a 
Democratic President will do the same thing. If this becomes standard 
practice, if our laws just become advisory, then there is no reason for 
any of us to show up any longer. Why do you work so hard, why do you 
care so much about getting to this place if you don't care when the 
President just ignores the laws that we pass?
  It is very hard to find consensus here, especially on an issue as 
important and as politically sensitive as gun violence. So when we do 
find that consensus, on behalf of the kids and the families out there 
who are begging us to work together to save lives, we should protect 
that consensus.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.

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