[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 106 (Wednesday, June 24, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3178-S3179]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor with good news. It is 
really important news, but it is news that not a lot of people in this 
country know about. We are experiencing, over the last 3 years, a 
dramatic decline in the number of people who are killed by guns. Gun 
violence rates in this country are plummeting, and they have been 
plummeting since 2002.
  Let me just give you a couple of numbers. From 2023 to 2024--the last 
year that we have full numbers for--we saw urban gun homicides drop by 
16.7 percent. That is extraordinary. And, in general, urban homicides 
have been dropping by double-digit percentages over the last 3 years.
  Mass shootings are way down. That might actually make sense to you 
because, while we still hear about these awful mass shootings on the 
news, we have a sense that they are not appearing on our television 
screens with the rapidity and frequency they were a few years ago.
  Now, in 2025, there were 400 mass shootings in America. That is 
unacceptable. There are still more mass shootings than days in the 
year, but that is a 41-percent decline from 2021.
  Similarly, school shootings have declined over the last 2 years.
  This is all good news. There are more people alive today because 
something is changing in America. And while it is still unacceptable 
that we are averaging a mass shooting every day in this country, the 
numbers are unquestionably heading in the right direction.
  Now, there are a set of complicated factors to explain why that is 
happening, but it is not coincidental to the passage in 2022 of the 
most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in 30 years. 
And that is why I am on the floor today, because tomorrow will mark 4 
years since this Senate passed and got signed into law the Bipartisan 
Safer Communities Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that 
strengthened the gun laws of this country while respecting the 
constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to be able to purchase and 
own weapons.
  Let me just remind you of what that bill did, because it is important 
to remember that we can come together.
  There were, I think, 15 Republican Senators that supported this 
legislation. It received Republican votes in the House of 
Representatives as well.
  This legislation said: Listen, we have got to be a little bit more 
careful before we sell an assault weapon to a 19-year-old or a 20-year-
old--because we had seen, over and over again, that it tended to be, 
unfortunately, young men under the age of 21 who were carrying out 
these mass murders.
  And so while legislation didn't take away the ability of someone 
under 21 to buy a weapon--because this is what we needed in order to 
get bipartisan consensus--we did put enhanced background checks for 
those individuals--just an extra check, most significantly, with the 
local police department to see if this was somebody that the police 
knew as being troubled. Well, since passage of the bill, 800 firearms 
purchases have been prevented solely because of these enhanced checks.

  These were mainly purchasers that were prohibited from buying a 
weapon, but until you called the local police department, you didn't 
find out that they were actually prohibited. But sometimes it was that 
this was an individual that was in crisis. The local police department 
knew it, and the enhanced check caught them.
  The second thing the bill did was just make firearms trafficking a 
Federal crime. It was crazy that it hadn't been. It made trafficking 
and straw purchasing a Federal crime. And since that bill went into 
effect, there have been 280 cases with 525 defendants who have been 
brought under Federal charges for gun trafficking. That is a big part 
of why there is so much urban gun homicide--because there is a pipeline 
of illegal guns that goes into places like Hartford, CT; New Haven, CT; 
or Chicago, IL. Now we have interrupted that pipeline of illegal guns.
  What is something else that that bill did? It said that if you have a 
history of domestic violence, you can't buy a weapon, regardless of 
whether that violence is against your wife or your girlfriend. There 
used to be something called the boyfriend loophole. If you had 
committed domestic violence against your girlfriend, you could still 
purchase and have weapons. Well, we closed that loophole on a 
bipartisan basis. And since that law passed, there have been 10,000 
firearms purchases that have been denied because the individual had a 
history of domestic violence.
  Now, the way that we got that bill passed, with Republican votes, was 
to give the ability of that individual to reapply for the ability to 
buy firearms. We didn't take that right away permanently. Some of us 
might have wanted that prohibition to be permanent after you have a 
domestic violence conviction on your record, but that is how we got the 
bill passed--an example of how we can find common ground.
  And then the last thing I want to mention is that the bill put about 
$1.4 billion into funding existing and new community anti-gun violence 
measures--and this is maybe the secret sauce. This is maybe the biggest 
explanation as to why numbers are going down.
  What we find in community after community that is plagued with high 
rates of gun violence is that it is normally a very small group of 
people--again, largely young men--that are committing these acts of 
violence and that if you engage in targeted interventions aimed at 
these small groups of young men, you can very quickly get gun violence 
rates down, and it doesn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, 
especially in a small community like Hartford.
  Hartford has a number of really impactful but small organizations 
that do this community anti-gun violence work. We gave them a small 
amount of money from this legislation, and they have made a big, big 
difference in Hartford. These are groups like Hartford Communities That 
Care, Compass.
  Hartford had 37 murders in 2022, the year that we passed this bill. 
In 2025, Hartford had 10 murders. That is an extraordinary decline, 37 
to 10.
  In 2020, there were 223 shootings, a reminder most people don't die 
in shootings. They get badly wounded. Their lives are altered by the 
shooting even though they don't die.
  Mr. President, 223 shootings in Hartford in 2020--89 last year. That 
is a 25-year low. And all the laws we passed made a difference in 
Connecticut, but Connecticut already had pretty strict gun laws so a 
lot of the stuff we passed didn't have a big impact on Connecticut, but 
the community anti-gun violence money did because those groups are now 
well-funded.
  Again, these aren't groups with $10 million-a-year budgets. These are 
often very small organizations that have four or five people on staff. 
For instance, one of the things that these groups often do is when 
there is a shooting, they rush to the emergency room because there are 
often cycles of retributive violence that play out: Somebody gets shot. 
Their group of friends congregate at the emergency room. They make a 
plan to engage in retributive violence. Well, these community workers 
can often get to the emergency room and interrupt that cycle of 
violence, and they have been enormously successful.
  Now, there are threats to the progress we have made. I don't want to 
make this a speech about President Trump, but it is just true that he 
has stopped funding the programs that support community anti-gun 
violence initiatives.
  There are also billions of dollars in that bill that we passed for 
school-based mental health, and he has also suspended many of those 
accounts. That is bad news.
  He has also issued new regulations that undermine other parts of the 
bill,

[[Page S3179]]

but there is nothing President Trump can do to stop the enhanced 
background checks or the ability of prosecutors to go after gun 
traffickers or the denial of weapons purchases to individuals convicted 
of domestic violence.
  And so I don't want you to hear me say that the President is 
unwinding all of our progress. He is unwinding some of our progress--
our bipartisan progress--but much of the statute can't be unwound.
  And so I just want to give us a little pat on the back because 4 
years ago, after the awful shooting in Uvalde, four Senators got 
together--supported by another bigger ring of bipartisan Senators--and 
we were able to come up with a bill that was not perfect, was not 
everything that I wanted or that many other Democratic Senators wanted, 
but it was progress.
  And we have seen the impact of that bill: literally extraordinary 
declines in mass shootings and homicides, all happening, not 
coincidentally, as soon as we passed that bill.
  The gun lobby has a habit of arguing that the only way to stop a bad 
guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The gun lobby says the answer 
to gun violence is more guns. Well, we proved that if you pass 
legislation that just makes it a little bit harder for the wrong people 
to get their hands on weapons--people who have serious criminal 
convictions, people who are mentally ill--you make it a little bit 
easier for prosecutors to go after the gun traffickers, you give a 
little bit more resources to the people who do anti-gun violence work 
in our communities, that you can make a big difference.
  I live in one of these traditionally high-gun-violence-rate 
neighborhoods. I live just south of downtown in Hartford, and my home 
is on the route to the primary critical care hospital in the south end 
of Hartford--Hartford Hospital. And I will just say: There are far 
fewer ambulances passing my house with victims of gunshot wounds. In 
fact, it is an extraordinary reduction.
  In 2020, I think the year that I bought that house, there were 223 
shootings--223 gun violence victims being rushed to Hartford Hospital 
or Saint Francis Hospital. In 2025, there were 89. So I know we are 
often consumed with the bad news here, but that is really good news. 
That is really good news. And it is evidence of the fact that this 
place is not fundamentally broken. There are these moments when 
Republicans and Democrats can come together and pass laws that save 
lives--4 years since the passage and signature of the Bipartisan Safer 
Communities Act, something that this Senate should be proud of.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.