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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President and colleagues, this is a speech I have been thinking about giving for a long time. I think it is a speech somebody needs to give, but it is hard. There is some really awful stuff I am going to talk about, things that cut deep when we think about who we are, when we think about how we handle crises and emergencies, about the things we need to do as a human race to feel safe.

I want to talk to you today about what happened on May 24, 2022-- almost 2 years ago--at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX. After 2 years of review, investigation, hand-wringing, grief, and anger, we now have as full a picture of what happened that day as we ever will, and we need to talk about it because it is important.

Here is what we know: 1 hour and 17 minutes after a gunman entered Robb Elementary School and opened fire on two classrooms full of children, 54 minutes after a school police officer got a call from his wife, who said that she had been shot in her classroom, 38 minutes after a 9-1-1 dispatcher told police there were confirmed victims in the classrooms, only then did a team of officers finally enter room 111 at Robb Elementary School and kill the gunman--1 hour and 17 excruciating minutes. The kids inside those classrooms--9, 10, 11 years old--and their teachers waited to be saved by the people whose job it was to keep them safe.

The students in rooms 111 and 112 had prepared for this moment. They had practiced what they should do if something like this were to happen: Drop to the floor. Sit along the walls farthest from the door and the windows. Crouch under desks, countertops--anywhere you could be safe.

They stayed silent--so silent that the officers on the other side of the door thought that there couldn't possibly be children inside. Surely, they would be crying out. But they were doing, in fact, exactly what they were told to do. They were doing their part.

As the minutes went on, outside the classroom stood not 10 armed officers, not 50, not even 100. Outside the classroom and surrounding the school, 376 armed officers were present--outside the classroom.

Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Ailyn Ramos hugged her friend Leann Garcia to stop her from screaming out in pain.

Inside the classroom, Elsa Avila, a teacher in room 109, tried to stay conscious after a bullet ripped through her stomach. Her students whispered to her:

Miss, we love you. You're going to be OK.

They told each other:

Don't let her go to sleep.

Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Khloie Torres and Miah Cerrillo called 9-1-1, begging for help.

Inside the classroom, Khloie and Miah's classmate Kendall Olivarez sobbed in pain as she lay stuck under their teacher, who had already been killed.

As 33 students and 3 of their teachers spent an hour and 17 minutes trapped in a room with an active shooter, there were hundreds of armed adults who stood outside. Doing what? Well, they were doing the things that would naturally occur to you if you heard that a man with military weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition is just around the corner from you on a killing spree. They were scared. They were disorganized. They were panicked. They were frozen. There were good people amongst those 376, but they were all providing natural reactions given the circumstances. But that does not excuse their inaction. Of course it doesn't.

The adults--the adults--in Uvalde had bought into this idea that more security, more men with guns in schools would keep those kids safe. In fact, the Uvalde School District placed so much faith in the ability of armed security to keep schools safe that it had its own school police department. But all of those men with guns didn't protect those kids. The opposite happened.

How on Earth could this happen? How could there be 300 armed law enforcement officers doing nothing for so long as children called 9-1- 1, as parents ran to the school and begged to be allowed in? How could those officers wait 1 hour and 17 minutes when the entire point of having a school police department full of men with guns is to stop something like this from happening?

Earlier this year, the Justice Department released a report to try to answer some of those questions. They spent 20 months reviewing hours of body cam footage, audio recordings, training logs. They interviewed 260 people who were there that day. The final report paints a damning and infuriating picture of what went wrong, and I think it is important to talk about it because it shows how flawed this promise is--this promise that good guys with guns is all that is necessary to stop bad guys with guns.

At 11:35, Sergeant Daniel Coronado heard gunfire and ran inside the school. Another round of shots grazed two officers who had been approaching the classrooms with him. One of those officers kept moving toward the classroom, but he turned back when realized that none of his colleagues had followed him.

Again, this reaction from those initial police officers is understandable. There was a madman inside that classroom. Instinct tells you to run away, not to run toward danger.

Then confusion set in--the second predictable element of an active shooter crisis. Sergeant Coronado relayed an unconfirmed report that the gunman was contained and had barricaded himself inside a classroom, leading officers to believe that they were dealing with a barricaded subject, not an active shooter. Active shooter training says rush into the classroom, but they didn't think it was an active shooter, so they didn't act with urgency.

Eventually, they just couldn't continue to rationalize standing idle because it was a barricaded suspect. They continued to hear gunfire. They learned that one of the officers' wives was shot inside the classroom. They heard over their radios that there were victims. Common sense would have told them that there were kids inside these classrooms. Forty minutes into this massacre, there should have been no doubt what they were dealing with. This was an active shooter. This was the time to enter the classroom, but instead they continued to wait.

Now, part of the confusion was that there was no clear command structure; there was no one to give orders. There were probably lots of men with guns who wanted to go in but were told that they couldn't. But there really was no excuse. At one point, the officers claimed that they needed keys, but they admitted not a single officer even walked up to the door to check if it was unlocked. Why? Because they all knew that inside that classroom was a young man equipped with military-style weaponry that could kill them--that would kill them the instant they opened that door.

Finally, at 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the shooter entered the school, a team of officers breached the room and killed the gunman. Two children still had a pulse when they were rescued. Eva Mireles, the teacher whose husband was on the scene, died in an ambulance that never even left the school.

One gunman, 376 armed officers--1 hour and 17 minutes of avoidable, indescribable horror; 19 children and 2 teachers dead--a colossal failure.

So what does this tell us? What can we learn from this? Because we are commanded to learn something from these tragedies.

I know human instinct. I know we have a biological inclination to want to fight fire with fire. So our first reaction, when we see the threat of a deranged young man with a gun, is to mirror that threat with our defensive reaction. If a gunman steps into a building where our kids are, we want them to be met with equal force: Confront a bad guy with a gun with a good guy with a gun.

At some level, in here, I get that that makes sense. I understand this reaction, because I have felt it. I have had kids in these post- Sandy Hook public schools for the last 12 years. And when we wrote the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most comprehensive gun legislation in 30 years, it made important changes to our gun laws and invested in mental health, but it also provided $300 million for school hardening. So I am on the record supporting putting more security in our schools.

But in the wake of Uvalde and in the wake of all of this reporting, it is increasingly impossible to square this gut reaction so many of us understandably have with reality. It is time for me to admit that to myself. It is time for all of us to admit this publicly.

In 1970, police officers were stationed in just 1 percent of America's public schools. By 1997, 22 percent had an officer onsite, and 43 percent in 2016. By 2019, the majority of schools had a police officer onsite. You can match almost every uptick with a high-profile school shooting.

But despite this exponential increase in armed officers at schools, the shootings have not abated. They have increased in frequency. More guns and more police and more armed security in schools has done nothing to stop this trajectory.

We should have seen this with our own eyes well before Uvalde. When the gunshots started at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, the armed police at the school that day ran away and then argued in court that they had no legal obligation to protect those kids, only an obligation to protect themselves.

But it is not just anecdotal evidence. A study of 179 school shootings between 1999 and 2019 found that there was no association between the presence of a police officer in a school and any reduction in the severity of violent shootings in those schools.

When you really stop to think about this, it does make sense. A shooter with an AR-15 needs a minute or two to get off enough rounds to kill dozens. Even if the armed security officer does the right thing and runs to the gunfire--instead of the natural thing, running away from it--time is on the shooter's side. So it is not surprising that there is no evidence that more guns in our schools keep our kids safe.

What tends to happen, frankly, when police officers populate our schools, is that ordinary school misbehaviors get criminalized, and kids, especially Black boys and disabled students, get arrested for things that used to be dealt with in the principal's office. The police in these schools don't end up stopping mass shootings. They just end up arresting a bunch of kids and ruining their lives.

We can zoom out even further to consider this argument of whether more guns--or more good guys with guns--make our communities safer or less safe. If good guys with guns protected us from gun violence, you would expect States or communities with high rates of legal gun ownership to be safer, but they aren't.

You can probably guess by now that the opposite is actually true. In places with high rates of legal gun ownership, there are more gun deaths than in places with low rates of gun ownership.

There is a difference between what makes us feel safe and what actually makes us safer. The reality is this: More people with guns and more guns do not make our kids safer. That is an uncomfortable truth--I get it--because we want to believe that we can meet force with potential force, and everything will be okay.

But there were 376 armed police officers and security outside that classroom in Uvalde. There were plenty of good guys with guns outside that classroom, some of them steps away from a shooting that was ongoing for an hour, and it did nothing for those kids. Frankly, it made the massacre harder to live with for so many of those parents because it exposed this fraud that told us that we can protect ourselves with more guns.

This is a hard lesson to learn. After Uvalde and Parkland, Texas and Florida just doubled down on a failed strategy. They required more guns in our schools, despite no evidence that it works. In Tennessee, after the terrible Covenant School shooting, the State legislature went even further, arming teachers with guns.

In the movies, a heroic lone good guy with a gun kills dozens of armed evildoers, but that is in the movies. That is fiction. That is not reality. A teacher with a gun isn't going to save our kids. Remember, the evidence tells us, over and over again, that in places with more guns, there are more gun deaths, not less.

But amidst all of this bad news, amidst the failure to learn the lessons of Uvalde and Parkland, there is good news. There are policies that work. In States with gun safety laws--like universal background checks, safe storage, and red flag laws--fewer people die by guns.

In the wake of the passage--the bipartisan passage--of the 2022 gun bill, gun crime is down. Urban gun murders have dropped by 12 percent from 2022 to 2023--the biggest 1-year drop in the history of the country. And 2024 is on pace for another record-setting drop in urban gun crime.

And, this year, the pace of mass shootings is way down as well. Between January and May of this year, there were 29 percent fewer mass shootings compared to the same period of time in 2023.

It is proof that when the primary focus of your efforts is to pass laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, instead of loading our communities up with guns, and putting money into communities to help get at the root causes of violence, you can save lives.

What happened that day at Robb Elementary School is a disgrace. We will never understand--I will never understand--the grief and the pain of those parents who lost kids that day, who watched 376 armed officers wait an hour and 17 minutes to confront that gunman.

What we can do--what we can do--is make a decision to not simply avert our eyes from what happened that day because it is what is easier, but instead study and learn from this tragedy.

Flooding our schools and our communities with more guns won't solve the problem. It won't stop the next Uvalde. What will keep our kids safe is keeping guns--especially the most dangerous guns--out of the hands of dangerous people.

Congress has the power right now to do something about it. We could start, for instance, by responding to last week's Supreme Court decision and passing legislation to ban the conversion of semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. Our kids would be safer, undoubtedly, if it was harder for a deranged psychopath to get their hands on a banned automatic weapon.

The majority of Americans are on our side. They want Congress to act, to pass things like universal background checks, to ban bump stocks. They are sick of us learning the wrong lesson every time tragedy strikes. It is never too late for this time to be different.

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