MSNBC "All In with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Chris Murphy

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

HAYES: And joining me now is Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut. Senator, where were you when you heard about this and decided to take to the floor?

MURPHY: So, I think I was in my office on my way to preside over the Senate. We take turns sitting in the presiding chair. I was there this evening to listen to Republicans lecture the body on the sanctity of life. Given the abortion case before the Supreme Court tomorrow morning, Republicans were coming down in droves to talk about the importance of protecting and defending life.

[20:55:25]

And on my drive home, I just became furious sort of thinking about how their concern for life ends at birth and doesn`t extend to the kids who are showing up to elementary and middle and high schools every single day fearing for their lives. And so, I turned around my car, I went back to the Senate floor this evening, and I talked about the fact that there are 100 people every single day dying from guns. There are millions of kids who go to school every single day fearing for their life.

On top of the trauma of COVID, we are now layering on top of children, once again, the fear that they won`t emerge from their day in the classroom alive. And I just at my wit`s end about why Republicans concern for life seems so limited when these choices that we could make to try to protect our kids are so obvious, are so politically popular, are so possible.

HAYES: Yes. And I what I liked about your speech and the book -- actually, wrote on this -- he wrote a book on violence. It`s quite, quite good, is that, you know, we -- there`s the subsection of school shootings, which are the most horrific conceivable instantiation of this kind of violence.

But that`s part of a broader phenomenon which we don`t necessarily cover on this show every night. It happens across the country, day in day out, night in night out, of hundreds of people being shot by guns. And it happens at a level that doesn`t happen anywhere else, as you said in wealthy democracies.

MURPHY: It`s happening at a rate, Chris, right now that we have not seen in decades. 2020 was the deadliest year in our lifetimes. We saw a 40 % increase in gun murders, which was not coincidental to a 25 percent increase in gun sales.

So, we are flooding the market with firearms that we choose not to regulate in the way that every other high-income nation does. We have a Republican Party, as you talked about earlier in the show, that is engaged in the celebration and fetishization of violence.

And we have a president, our prior president, who spent four years sort of making us fearful of each other, making us think that we have to arm ourselves in order to protect ourselves from the other. It`s a toxic combination that has led to the highest rates of gun violence in our lifetime. And it`s time that we refuse to accept it. It`s time that we do something about it.

HAYES: You know, what`s truly profoundly bizarre about this moment, as you cite the statistics is that is the kind of polarization and political valence of the -- of the problem or the question depending how it`s phrased. Republicans would love to talk your ear off about crime. That crime is going up, crime is a problem.

If you think gun violence or interpersonal gun violence, it`s like well -- but that`s the most severe form of crime. It`s the thing that we should be most worried about is when people take up arms against each other when they -- when they maim or kill each other and the main way they do that is with guns. And yet, for some reason, if you phrase it that way, it`s like, well, that`s not really a political problem, like shoplifting in San Francisco. That`s a political problem, but people shooting each other is not.

MURPHY: Yes, I mean, listen, there`s just something fundamentally different about violence done with a gun in that it often is the last violence that has ever done to you. Your life ends. And, you know, there`s the story I tell in the book about the moment when American violence rates depart from the rest of the world where we become the global outlier.

And it`s when the handgun is invented. America decides not to regulate the handgun, other countries in Europe do. And all of a sudden in this country, disputes that used to end up in a fistfight or a shoving match end up in a homicide. And that`s the difference in this country.

When kids start -- when their brains break, they have access to an assault weapon, and they can turn it on their classmates. In other countries, kids brains still break, but they don`t have access to military-style weapons. And well, some kids may get hurt, it`s by a punch in the face, not at the end of a gun.

HAYES: Yes, I have to say also, as we prepare for those arguments at the Supreme Court, the sanctity of life, the spectacle of the collective shrug by so much the Republican Party at the continued staggering unfathomable toll of the pandemic is the most morally shocking thing that I`ve lived through in my adult professional life, it continues to be, and really renders the sanctity of life talk exceedingly thin. Senator Chris Murphy of the state of Connecticut, thank you very much.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source