Gun Violence
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
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, 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.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source