Gun Violence
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, C.J. Brown was 7 years old. He was a second grader at Clarksdale Collegiate academy in Mississippi. Clarksdale, MS, is a relatively small town of 15,000 people. Everybody knows each other in Clarksdale. C.J. was described as a really bright young student. His principal and director at his school said that he was a great student. He was always cheerful and friendly to his classmates and teachers.
Clarksdale is reeling right now because just a few weeks ago, on October 12, little C.J. Brown was sitting in a car outside of a laundromat, and he was shot to death. The owner of a nearby corner store, the Tiger Mart, said that C.J. and his mom and his little sister used to come in all the time, friendly as can be, chatting up a storm. The owner of that little convenience store said that he considered C.J. and his mom and his little sister to be family.
You can say that C.J. was in the wrong place at the wrong time--a 7- year-old kid in a car outside of a laundromat shot to death--but he wasn't. He was in the right place at the right time. He was in what should have been a safe place his hometown, just sitting in a car.
That day, there were three shootings over 5 hours in this small town of Clarksdale. C.J. wasn't the only victim, but his death made news because he was 7 years old, and now he is gone.
The problem is, this story isn't the exception; it is the rule, increasingly so, across this country. For the last 8 years, I have come down to the floor with a chart that looks very much like this. In fact, I think this is the chart that I have displayed for about 5 years straight. I come down here every few weeks--sometimes, in busier times, every month or so--and I tell the story of men and women and children, often like C.J., to try to rattle the conscience of this body to do something about the epidemic of gun violence in this country.
These numbers in and of themselves are stunning. This is my old chart showing 36,000 people a year are killed by gunshot wounds--3,000 a month, 100 people day. There is no other nation in the high-income world that has anything approaching these numbers when it comes to gun violence. But these numbers are irrelevant now because what has happened over the last year and a half is a story unto itself.
Gun violence rates have spiked during the pandemic. In fact, the increase in 2020 was the biggest in 60 years from year to year. So I now have to bring a new chart to the floor. This one that I have used for 5 years now is irrelevant because no longer are 36,000 people dying a year from gunshot wounds. No longer are we losing 3,000 a month or 100 a day. We are now losing 40,000 a year, 3,300 a month, 110 people a day.
You can say: Well, that is a small increase. A hundred people used to die from gunshot wounds a day; now only 110 people a day.
That is 10 more families every single day, like the family of C.J. Brown, who have lost a loved one, often in the prime of their life, to a preventable crime that happens nowhere else at this frequency amongst our high-income peers.
What is interesting about 2020, though, is that overall crime rates didn't spike like gun homicides did. In fact, over all, major crimes in 2020 in this country went down, but gun homicides went up. There were 5,000 more gun homicides in 2020 than in 2019.
What is going on if major crimes are going down but gun homicides are going up? The story is likely complicated, but at the heart of it is this: More guns equals more crime. Forget the mythology that tells you that if you buy a gun, you are going to use that gun to protect yourself, that you are going to use it against an intruder or somebody who is trying to do harm to you. No. The data is the data. You can't get around it. It shows that for every community that has a 1-percent increase in gun ownership, what comes with it is a 1-percent increase in gun homicides. The more guns you have, the more likely that you are to have days like October 12, 2021, in Clarksdale, MS.
But there is more data to prove this point. What is interesting is that over the last 10 years, more and more homicides in this country are gun homicides. Ten years ago, about two-thirds of all homicides in this country involved a gun. But we have had more and more and more guns being purchased over the last 10 years. It used to be that maybe only 32 percent of households had a gun. Today, that number is 39 percent. So we have a lot more households with guns.
We had record numbers of guns bought in 2020. In March of 2020, for the first time, the background check system registered 1 million checks. Never before has this country had more guns bought and sold than in 2020. Not coincidentally, today, the number of homicides that involve a gun isn't two-thirds any longer; it is three-quarters. It went from 67 percent in a decade to 77 percent. More guns equals more homicides. More guns equals a greater number of violent crimes being perpetuated with guns. The data is the data. You can't get around it.
You think you are making yourself safer by bringing a gun into your house, but more often than not, that gun is going to be used to harm you or a loved one than it is against someone who is trying to do harm to you.
Many of these guns end up very quickly becoming illegal guns because they may at first be sold through a licensed gun dealer, but pretty soon, they get into the black market. Pretty soon, those guns get into the black internet market, the gun show market, where anybody can buy a gun regardless of their criminal record in many States without being caught, and those guns get trafficked to all sorts of people who should never own them.
The data is the data.
But here is what we also know about 2020: In States that have tougher gun laws, the rise in violent crime in 2020 was much lower than in States that don't have universal background checks. Now, we make the case here that gun laws matter, that if you take some commonsense steps to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people--violent criminals, people with serious mental illness--you are going to have less gun crime. Well, that is what 2020 tells us. In States that have universal background checks, the violent crime rate just ticked up from 2019 to 2020--just ticked up--but in States without expanded background checks, the violent crime rate skyrocketed. There was a much bigger increase in States without universal background checks than in States with universal background checks. Common sense tells you why. Those States just do a little bit better job of making sure that only responsible gun owners can get their hands on a gun.
So we have these two stories from 2020 to tell. The first is a tragic one--a dramatic increase in the number of homicides; new highs in terms of the number of people who die at the hands of a gun every single day. But this second story about how States that have gotten serious about commonsense measures supported by 90 percent of Americans to make sure that only law-abiding citizens have guns--they were able to control these increases much better than the States that didn't implement universal background checks and commonsense gun laws.
So I tell the story of C.J. today to try to shake this body into action and to try to make folks understand that we have all the data we need to have to tell us what works. None of it is that controversial. No matter what State you come from--blue or red, Republican, Democratic--your constituents support universal background checks. The data tells us that while 2020 was an awful year for gun crime, it was a lot more awful in the States that didn't invest in that policy. So why not just implement it on a national basis? It is politically popular and impactful when it comes to saving lives.
Lastly, even if you don't agree with me that we should make these commonsense changes to try to do something about this rising epidemic of gun violence in this country; even if you don't want to change the gun laws in this Nation, I have another offer for you.
I heard Senator Cornyn come down to the floor and talk about all the radical policies that are in the Build Back Better agenda. I have seen the polling on the Build Back Better agenda. None of it looks too radical because the American people seem to really love all the parts of the Build Back Better agenda, from the investments in green energy, to the help for families who are trying to afford childcare, to the improvements in the Medicare system. But here is another commonsense investment in the Build Back Better agenda: community gun violence initiatives. Inside the Build Back Better agenda is $5 billion to invest in community programs that wrap services around at-risk youth to try to stop this cycle of violence that plays out.
Now, what is interesting in the 2020 data is that gun crime is becoming much more geographically spread out in this Nation. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago, there was a case to be made for the concentration of gun violence in a handful of cities. That is actually not the case any longer. Today, gun violence happens everywhere. It happens in small towns. It happens in small cities. It happens in the big cities. But it is still true that there are these very, very poor, very, very economically challenged neighborhoods in which there are higher rates of gun violence.
What we know is that these community violence programs work. In Connecticut, we had one--before it was defunded--in New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport. It identified youth at risk of falling into this cycle of violence. It supports them with programs that give them an alternative to that lifestyle. Between 2011 and 2016, combined gun homicides in these three cities were cut in half.
A similar program in New York saw homicides in a South Bronx neighborhood where a program was being implemented decline by 37 percent compared to a very similarly matched neighborhood nearby that was used as a control site.
I can give you more and more evidence of how these investments in neighborhoods lift people up economically and help stop the cycle of violence.
So I can shower you with data to show you why commonsense changes in our gun laws would do something about this stunning increase in the rate of gun deaths in this country from 2019 to 2020, but we can also just come together around an investment in these communities and these kids and these families that doesn't necessarily have the same high degree of political temperature as the debate around guns does, and it still will have a significant impact.
So I will continue to come down to the floor and make this case. I will continue to come down to the floor and try to tell the story of these victims of gun violence--kids like CJ Brown.
I hope that this will be the last chart. I hope that the next chart, in fact, will show that these numbers are coming down. But I doubt that I will have that opportunity because until we get serious about making changes in our gun laws, to update them to match with the preferences of 90 percent of Americans, and until we get serious about investments in these neighborhoods--part of the Build Back Better agenda--I fear that these numbers will continue to rise higher and higher.
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