Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, in the Gallery right now listening to the Senate debate on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is one of my interns. Her name is Sari Kaufman. I am glad to have her as an intern in my office this summer, but Sari has a story to tell because she is a survivor of a mass shooting.

She was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman entered that campus and shot and killed her friends, her classmates. She reminds us that she went to more funerals in a matter of a week than many adults do in their entire lifetime.

She was in debate class when the shooting started, and she ran for her life, as did hundreds of other survivors of that horrible day.

No student in America should have to experience what she went through. No young person should have the burden that she bears to come to Washington and argue for changes that will make sure that other students don't go through the same thing, and no parent should have to go through the grief that parents day after day do, mass shooting after mass shooting, urban homicide after urban homicide, as we lose a generation of kids, of young people in this Nation to an epidemic of gun violence that can be stopped by better public policy.

I have been on this floor hundreds of times pleading with my colleagues to do something, and I am so grateful that Senator Cornyn, Senator Tillis, and a handful of their colleagues on the Republican side this time stood up and sat down with Senator Sinema, myself, and other Democrats to find the common denominator.

I am here on the floor to talk a little bit more about what our piece of legislation does, but I agree with Senator Sinema--this is a moment where we have shown this country what is possible here in the U.S. Senate.

I talked last night about the fear that families in Connecticut and all across the country felt in the wake of Buffalo and Uvalde and that twin fear about what fate awaited their children but also what fate awaited our democracy if we were unable to rise to this moment to deal with this existential challenge--the loss of life in schools, in shopping malls, in supermarkets.

And while this compromise was hard-earned, every single day for the last 4 weeks proved to me what can happen in this body if we decide to come out of our political corners.

And let me say that this moment that we are in today, on the precipice of passing the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in the last 30 years, would not be possible if it were not for Senator Sinema. It would not be possible if it wasn't for her decision to sit down and help us find a path to what was possible.

But it is also clear that without the leadership of Senator Cornyn, who has been through way too many of these tragedies in his State, and Senator Tillis, a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights but also somebody who believes in this place finding a way to that common denominator, this day wouldn't be possible either.

So I want to talk for a few moments about what this bill does because there will be a lot of folks who focus on what it doesn't do. It certainly doesn't do all of the things I think are necessary to end the epidemic of gun violence in this Nation. But it will save thousands of lives; there is no doubt about it in my mind. And, in fact, I could make the argument that every single one of the provisions in this bill, in and of themselves, would save thousands of lives.

We don't get to do that very often in this place. We don't get a chance very often to pass legislation that has this kind of impact. So if you want to focus on what is not in this legislation, you can, it is your prerogative, but I want to spend a few minutes talking about the difference this legislation will make in people's lives.

Senator Sinema and Senator Cornyn rightly focused--and I put it right at the top--this major, historic investment in mental health access. I made no secret in my belief that you can't solve America's gun violence epidemic simply through mental health funding, but there is no doubt there is an intersection, and there is no doubt that our mental health system is just broken--period, stop--whether you believe that it has any intersection with America's gun violence epidemic. There are far too many kids and adults in crisis in this country who cannot get access to mental health services. In my State, kids get stacked up in emergency rooms in hallways, waiting days, if not weeks, for inpatient beds.

There is $11 billion in this bill to unlock pathways to treatment for kids and adults all across this country; funding in this bill for school and community safety--$2 billion to make our schools safer, not just for better door-locking mechanisms, but also in programs inside these schools that can try to identify kids in crisis early. There will be supportive school environments that cut down on the pathways to violence. But also there is money for community-based intervention, what we call violence interruption programs. We have them in Connecticut where you intervene when a shooting victim comes to the hospital. You will make sure that that incident doesn't spiral into retributive violence in the community--funding for school safety and community safety in this bill.

And then the parts of the bill that probably get the most attention, the changes in our gun laws--these crisis intervention orders do work. Not every State has them. It was important to Senator Cornyn for money to go to every State regardless of whether they have red flag laws; but if you have a red flag law or you want to pass one, you will be able to get funding through this bill--significant funding--to allow you to implement that red flag law better. There are States that have them, but they don't work very well because people don't know how to access them. Police officers or first responders don't know what to do when they see somebody in crisis, when they see somebody threatening violence to themselves. Now, we will have funding to help States that will allow the authorities with court orders to be able to temporarily take weapons away from people who were threatening to kill themselves or threatening mass violence.

We are going to keep guns away from domestic abusers, and we know that in States that make sure that every domestic abuser is not allowed to purchase or possess guns that there is a significant impact on domestic violence. And so our bill makes it a national policy that if you have carried out an act of domestic violence against your partner, whether you are married to them or whether you are in a serious dating relationship, you are not going to be able to have guns in your home.

But because this is a compromise, we built in a process by which those who have no previous record and those who keep their records clean subsequent to the offense could get those rights back. It makes sense to us, especially if you are convicted of a felony, you have a pretty clear pathway in your States to get your rights back--your voting rights or your Second Amendment rights. So we set up that process for those who are convicted of domestic violence, dating misdemeanors.

Enhanced background checks for young buyers--whether we like it or not, the 18-to-21-year-old profile, those are the mass shooters right now in this country. And so we want to make sure that we do a more significant background check to make sure you are a responsible gun buyer, including a check with the local police department.

The shooter in Uvalde was known to local police. He didn't have an offense that would have prohibited him from buying those weapons. But, ask yourself, what would have happened if the local police department had gotten a phone call as a part of that background check, had been alerted that a young man who they knew to be in some form of crisis was going to buy AR-15-style weapons on his 18th birthday? Would there have been an opportunity for an intervention? Possibly. Maybe that tragedy could have been avoided by better public policy.

In this bill, we also have new penalties for gun trafficking and straw purchasing. Why on Earth hasn't the United States of America had a law banning gun trafficking at the Federal level or banning straw purchasing when the main way that guns get into the flow of illegal traffic is through straw purchasing and through complicated gun trafficking networks? Now, our Federal law enforcement agencies are going to have available to them new tools that will allow them to cut down on the flow of illegal weapons throughout the country, but in particular and most importantly, into our cities.

And the last thing we are going to do is more background checks because of this bill. We clarify in this bill the definition of a federally licensed gun dealer to make sure that everybody who should be licensed as a gun owner is. In one of the mass shootings in Texas, the individual who carried out the crime was mentally ill. He was a prohibited purchaser. He shouldn't have been able to buy a gun. He was actually denied a sale when he went to a bricks-and-mortar gun store, but he found a way around the background check system because he went online and found a seller there who would transfer a gun to him without a background check. It turned out that seller was, in fact, engaged in the business, but didn't believe the definition applied to him because the definition is admittedly confusing. So we simplified that definition and hope that will result--and I believe it will result--in more of these frequent online gun sellers registering, as they should, as federally licensed gun dealers which then requires them to perform background checks.

Each one of these provisions arguably saves thousands of lives in and of themselves; but cumulatively, this is a groundbreaking piece of legislation--a true compromise--not as much as I would like to do but certainly more than some Republicans would like to do. And it is a message to this country that there is a path forward in this body to address the epidemic of gun violence. It is a message to the activists like Sari Kaufman, who have been coming to this place, who have been going to their State legislatures, asking time and time again for change that speaking truth to power works, that legislators do listen.

And I hope it as an invitation for us to find more ways like this to work together in the future. My belief is that those who vote--even those who have been on the outside of these negotiations in the past will find that when they get back to their States, there will be unfamiliar supporters showing up at your events indoors, people who are cheering you on because we worked together to take this existential issue, the fear of death from gun violence, more seriously than we have in over 30 years.

So I am glad to share in a little bit more detail than I was last night what is in this package. I believe this is a week to focus on what we have done and not what we have left undone and to accept this as an invitation to find other ways to come together around difficult, vexing issues in this country.

I have a fourth grader the same age as those kids in Uvalde, and I do not want him to grow up in a world in which he and his classmates have to worry about their survival when they walk into their school every day. I do not want to live in a world where survivors of these tragedies in school after school have to become advocates and activists in this cause. And while this bill doesn't solve America's gun violence, it shows we have the potential to work together on these difficult vexing challenges in a brandnew lifesaving way.

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