Motion to Discharge
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to ask for unanimous consent from my colleagues to proceed to H.R. 8, the House- passed, bipartisan, comprehensive background checks bill. I want to tell you why I am making this request.
I understand the low likelihood of success, but I hope many of my colleagues took a minute to watch cell phone video from the school shooting in Michigan yesterday--on Tuesday, excuse me. It is absolutely terrifying to watch in real time children fleeing their classroom in fear that their lives were about to be ended. One hundred 9-1-1 calls came into the police during the shooting. Surveillance footage reportedly shows the gunman entering the bathroom with a backpack, then exiting a minute later without the backpack but with the handgun. He then started firing at students. When they started to run, he ``methodically and deliberately'' walked down the hallway and aimed his gun into classrooms at students who were unable to escape.
We think about the damage done and the number of lives lost--four so far--and those who were injured, but, really, the damage is so much broader because all of those kids who fled that violence, all of those kids who now don't think of school as a safe place--they are going through trauma and will go through trauma that may take a lifetime to address. Multiply that times millions because that is what is happening to kids all across this country who don't feel school is a safe place any longer, who don't think their neighborhoods are a safe place any longer, who grow up in parts of this country in which everyday gun violence is routine. They don't believe they will live past the age of 25.
The damage happening across this country is acute. It is real. It is pervasive. This is an epidemic of gun violence that exists in the United States and nowhere else. The risk, though, is that this country thinks about gun violence only when there is a mass shooting or only when there is a shooting at a school.
On Tuesday, the same day that the country was captivated by these terrifying images out of Oxford High School, in Taylor, TX, four bodies were found at a home in that town after an apparent murder-suicide. Police said that Anthony Davis, 57 years old, shot and killed his wife, his wife's stepchild, and the stepchild's romantic acquaintance--four people dead in Taylor, TX. Nobody knows about that nationally. Nobody knows about the other 50 to 100 people who died of gun violence on Tuesday.
This happens every single day in this country at a rate 10 times higher than any other country in the high-income world. It only happens in the United States of America. And we let it happen as a body. We let it happen as a body because it is not that we are unlucky in the United States; this is a policy choice that we make.
Let's be honest--the reason that we can't get anything done in the Senate is not because there is a disagreement amongst our constituents about what to do. Our constituents, Republicans and Democrats, support measures like universal background checks. In fact, there is almost nothing in the political world that enjoys such high support as universal background checks. Eighty percent, ninety percent of Americans--the majority of Republicans, Democrats, gun owners, non-gun owners--support universal background checks. But we can't get it done because it seems as if many of my colleagues here care more about the health of the gun industry and their profits than they do about the health of our kids. Gun industry profits are being put ahead of the safety of my children, of our children.
Shooting after shooting. Republicans in this body have refused to do anything meaningful that would reduce this pace of carnage, both in our schools and on the streets of America. As I said, it is not as if we don't know what the answer is.
Let me give you a remarkable statistic. In 2020, we saw a pretty substantial increase in violent crime all across the country. That increase was about 5 percent, and a lot of that was gun crime. Gun crime went up by 25 percent during 2020. But let's break down that number between the States that have universal background checks and the States that don't have universal background checks. There was a 5- percent overall increase in violent crime in the United States, but in 2020, in States that did not have and don't have universal background checks--meaning a criminal can get a gun at a gun show or online without any background check--in those States, violent crime went up 8 percent higher than the national average. What about the States like Connecticut that have universal background checks, where we make sure everybody gets a background check before they buy a gun? In those States, violent crime went up in 2020 by less than 1 percent. That is pretty stunning. On a percentage basis, violent crime goes up by eight times the level in States without universal background checks as in States with universal background checks.
I can just run through the litany of studies that show the difference in murder rates, in gun crime between States that have universal background checks and those that don't. One of the most recent studies from 2019, a Harvard study, shows a 15-percent difference. Now, that is surprising because no matter how strong Connecticut's background checks law is, States that don't have background checks end up allowing people to buy guns there, and they come into Connecticut. So until we have a national requirement that everybody go through a background check before, at the very least, they buy a gun at a commercial sale, there is nothing Connecticut can do to make itself completely immune to the epidemic of illegal guns.
That is why we are on the floor today, myself, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Durbin, to ask our colleagues to pass into law a bipartisan piece of legislation that has already passed the House of Representatives. This is a bill that would expand background checks to all sales in this country, with certain exceptions for transfers between immediate family members. This is a bill, as I mentioned, that is supported by the vast majority of Americans--one of the most popular policy proposals that exist in this country today. And it will save lives.
I mentioned the shooting in Texas because one of the critiques of this proposal often is, well, it wouldn't have stopped the last mass shooting. I don't claim that this proposal nor any other proposal to change the Nation's gun laws will have an effect on every single shooting, but the data is the data. These are the statistics.
This proposal is the most impactful when a State takes it. Universal background checks save lives, decrease gun violence, decrease violent crimes. The loss of life, when it is a shooting on the streets of New Haven, one person being shot, that is just as shattering to the lives of the people who love that victim as is a mass shooting.
So I am hopeful that the Senate will make the decision today to pass this bill into law. I understand the chances are slim to none that this unanimous consent request will be adopted, but I am at my wit's end. I am at my wit's end. I am prepared to use whatever means I have as an individual Senator to come down here and press this case forward.
8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, which was received from the House; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I know the Senator has his own UC request. I will just say two things very quickly. I am not surprised, but still disappointed, in the objection.
I take the Senator's advice seriously. We need 60 votes in order to pass legislation like H.R. 8 before this body, but I think, as the Senator knows, with Senator Durbin's guidance, I have been involved in multiple rounds of talks with Republican Senators throughout the year about trying to find some common ground. I think anyone who has been part of those talks knows that I have been willing to bend; I have been willing to compromise. I am not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to saving lives. And if the Senator is making an offer to join those talks or to sit down, then count me in.
But so far, a year into maybe the most deadly year in my political lifetime with respect to gun violence, I haven't been able to find one Republican taker for a compromise on the issue of background checks.
And then I will gladly send to the Senator the reams of data showing that background checks, in fact, do make a difference. As I cited, just in 2020, we see the difference between States that have background checks and those that don't.
I look forward to continuing that conversation.
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Mr. MURPHY. It is not new to the body. As Senator Grassley mentioned, this is something that has received a vote.
But in large part, it is a massive contraction of the universal background check system rather than what Americans support, which is an expansion of the background check system, and let me give you just two examples.
In this legislation there would be a change in law, such that for individuals who are subject to psychiatric confinement, the minute they leave that confinement, they get their gun rights restored. That is not the existing law. The existing law says that if you are so mentally ill that you have had to be inpatient, you don't get those gun rights restored unless you petition.
Second, this bill would say that for individuals who have been judged mentally incompetent--this is a regulatory term, not my term. But for individuals who have been determined mentally incompetent by a Federal Government Agency, they would have their gun rights restored. Right now, those individuals are not allowed to possess guns, but they would under this proposal.
So this amendment, while it has some, I think, important pieces to it, in large part is a pretty massive contraction of the number of background checks that would be done in this country, and for that reason I would object.
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