??In the weeks since a teenage gunman killed 21 people in an Uvalde, Texas elementary school, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has been hard to miss.
His speech on the Senate floor the night of the shooting went ultra-viral, drawing millions of views and a retweet from LeBron James. He has appeared on CNN and “The Daily Show” and published an op-ed on Fox News’s website. His gun reform efforts have been touted in profiles from The Washington Post and Vogue. He has held a series of press conferences, in Connecticut and in Washington D.C., to press for new federal legislation that might slow mass shootings and gun violence more broadly.
On Tuesday, Murphy met with President Joe Biden at the White House to share an update on where gun talks stand on Capitol Hill.
Such is the job these days for Connecticut’s junior senator, whose task in the wake of a mass shooting can evoke Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble back down each time. Over and over he gives speeches and grants interviews and backchannels with Republican colleagues in search of a gun reform compromise that can pass the Senate. And over and over a deal proves elusive and the issue fades, until a new tragedy inevitably surfaces it again.
Murphy has said if he leaves the Senate without passing major gun legislation his tenure will have been a failure. Nearly ten years in, he’s still working on it.
“I get up every day and go to sleep every night thinking about what happened in Sandy Hook and what happens every day in Hartford and New Haven,” Murphy said last week. “My job ultimately is to get something meaningful passed at the federal level, and I will feel like my public service is incomplete if I don’t succeed in getting something real done that saves lives.”
Now, with several major mass shootings fresh in the American consciousness, Murphy and his allies think they might be nearing a breakthrough. Along with Connecticut’s other senator, Richard Blumenthal, Murphy is part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers seeking a gun-reform compromise capable of a filibuster-proof Senate majority. While the talks aren’t expected to yield the sweeping changes Murphy and other Democrats might prefer, progress suddenly seems possible.
“This moment does feel different,” Murphy said. “What we’re talking about would be arguably the most significant thing we’ve done on gun violence in decades.”
Murphy is already a hero of the gun reform movement and maybe the most prominent voice for stricter gun laws in all of U.S. politics. Many national lawmakers have signature issues, but few have staked their political identities to a single subject to the extent Murphy has with guns.
Now the question is, can he get results?
‘Making up for lost time’
Murphy’s origin story as a national face of gun reform has been widely told. He was a congressman and soon-to-be senator at the time of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and was galvanized by the tears and the trauma he saw in Newtown. Soon after, he vowed to do all he could to prevent other families from enduring similar tragedy.
In reality, Murphy says now, there’s a little more to the story. As much as he was scarred by the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary, he was also haunted by a realization that parents nationwide, particularly in poor cities, had been suffering gun-related grief for years — and that lawmakers like him had barely been paying attention.
“I lived through Sandy Hook, I was there that day, that changed me, but I also feel really embarrassed that I didn’t work on this more seriously before Sandy Hook, given what happens in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport all the time,” he said. “I feel like I’m making up for lost time given the fact that I should have been a more vocal advocate on this issue before Sandy Hook ever happened.”
Mark Barden, a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise whose son Daniel was killed in the Newtown massacre, remembers a day shortly after the shooting, when he was beginning to explore how he might turn his grief into action. He was speaking to a family member about potential allies in Congress and Murphy’s name had just come up.
Then Barden’s phone rang. It was Murphy.
“From that initial conversation I felt immediately that he was genuine, he was passionate about this issue,” Barden recalled. “And over the years we have just continued that relationship as partners. He’s been a thought partner, a consultant, an advocate and a friend.”
Murphy says he was already on the Senate floor the evening of May 24 when news broke of the shooting in Uvalde. Details were still trickling out publicly as he took the floor, feeling an inescapable sense of deja vu, to deliver what became one of the most viral political speeches in years.
Over a brief five minutes, Murphy pleaded with colleagues to pass legislation that might curb mass shootings, repeatedly asking, with biting exasperation, “What are we doing?”
The speech quickly spread across the internet, garnering millions of views on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and beyond. To gun reform advocates, Murphy’s words were cathartic.
“Not only was it calling out all of those legislators who are not doing their job, but I also found it incredibly compelling that Chris said he would get on his hands and knees to change this,” said Jeremy Stein, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence. “And he meant it.”
To Gary Rose, a political scientist at Sacred Heart University, Murphy’s strident, years-long crusade for gun legislation lends him credibility on the issue that other lawmakers sometimes lack. Whereas some national politicians may take strong stands for the sake of a rolling camera, Rose said, Murphy seems to come by his passion honestly.
“I believe, in his case, he absolutely is sincere,” Rose said. “Murphy’s always been in the background a little bit compared to [Blumenthal], but now he’s in the forefront, largely out of his commitment to that issue.”
Notably, Murphy isn’t the only Connecticut senator deeply involved in the push for tighter gun laws. Blumenthal has also spent the past two weeks publicly making the case for gun reform while privately negotiating with Republican colleagues.
Blumenthal said Friday that he and Murphy are in constant communication, swapping ideas and intel.
“We talk about our latest conversations with colleagues, we talk about specific substantive provisions of the bill,” Blumenthal said. “A lot of the conversation is in shorthand because we’ve spent 10 years working on this issue together.’”
To Blumenthal, it’s no coincidence that a state that suffered one of the most infamous mass shootings in U.S. history has two senators deeply engaged on this particular issue.
“I think it definitely reflects Sandy Hook,” Blumenthal said. “The searing pain and grief that the state went through, literally our whole state, it touched so many people in so many different ways.”
‘Every single day we’re making progress’
Midway through a press conference last week celebrating an anti-violence initiative in the Hartford school district, Murphy felt his phone ring and looked down to see an incoming call. It was a Republican senator (Murphy wouldn’t say who) dialing him to discuss gun reform proposals.
“That’s new,” Murphy said later. “This level of engagement didn’t happen at any other time since Sandy Hook.”
In the end, viral clips and glowing profiles mean only so much if they don’t yield results. While Blumenthal, Murphy and several key Republicans have voiced optimism about their ongoing negotiations, it’s unclear what kind of compromise can truly pass a divided Senate, given the requirement (at least as long as the filibuster remains in place) that any legislation gains a 60-vote supermajority.
At what point, gun reform advocates have to ask themselves, is a compromise too watered down to be worth the effort?
“Compromise is a good thing, but we also have to make sure that we don’t compromise our lives away,” Stein said. “There has to be a line drawn somewhere that we don’t end up with legislation that is passed just to pass something.”
Already, those involved in gun negotiations have ruled out most of the strongest measures passed in Connecticut and other blue states, such as a broad ban on military-style weapons, a strict background check requirement for gun purchases and a national “red flag” law that would allow authorities to confiscate guns from people deemed to pose a risk.
According to a Politico report Monday, talks are now focused on expanding background checks, incentivizing states to pass their own red flag laws, enhancing school safety and increasing mental health programming.
As negotiations have progressed, Murphy has balanced his optimism with a healthy dose of realism. He believes he can find a compromise that will satisfy Republicans while also representing significant reform — but he has also lugged that boulder up the hill enough times to know it may very well fall again.
“I’m probably just conditioned [for pessimism] by my prior failure,” Murphy said, laughing. “But every conversation I have is more serious than the [last]. Every single day we’re making progress.”
Those involved in the Senate negotiations know that if talks fall through and reform legislation stalls, it might be a while before a similar chance arises again. Gun violence will inevitably fade to the background before long, and if Republicans capture the Senate this fall they are unlikely to bring major gun legislation to the floor.
That, of course, won’t stop Murphy from thinking and talking about guns and mass shootings and the trauma they leave behind. Regardless of what happens next, there will likely be future speeches and future interviews and future pleas.
“I want people to understand that it’s OK to still feel outraged about this, you don’t have to feel numb,” Murphy said. “I’m outraged by it, and I try to show that as a way to challenge my colleagues but also as a way to show Americans that they should feel outraged about it as well.”
In other words, he’s not ready to admit failure quite yet.
