Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy was in Vice President Kamala Harris’s seat, presiding over the Senate chamber, when he first heard about Uvalde. “I just sunk into the chair,” Murphy tells Vogue over the phone 48 hours later. The question he asked in an electrifying and rage-filled speech on the Senate floor minutes after learning the news was the same one he initially asked himself: “What are we doing here? What’s the purpose of the United States Senate, if not to respond to a tragedy like that?”
As the millions of people who blanketed social media with the speech likely sensed, Murphy didn’t prepare his remarks. He eschewed perfunctory thoughts and prayers or wooden platitudes. “I literally walked from the dais of the Senate to my desk and said out loud what I was thinking,” the senator says. “Normally, that’s not recommended in politics. You’re supposed to take a breath and sit down at your desk and compose your thoughts before you speak.”
That moment, however, did not call for composure but instead a leader who reflected our collective mix of agony, outrage, and fear. At his fieriest, Murphy seemed to be just as frustrated and disgusted with the Senate’s perpetual shrug at children and teachers being murdered in their classrooms as the parents across the country crying through school drop-off in the days that followed. Maybe it’s because Murphy, 48, is one of us: With his wife, attorney Catherine Holahan, he is the father of two sons, aged 10 and 13. The younger is a fourth grader, the same age as the 19 children killed at Robb Elementary.
“I have had to talk to them about the fear kids have about being shot,” Murphy says. Still, he admits, “I didn’t tell my kids about Sandy Hook for a very, very long time.”
In 2012, a then 39-year-old Murphy had just become the youngest senator in Congress when the Sandy Hook massacre happened, inextricably linking him to the gutting issue of gun violence. “I was in that firehouse at Sandy Hook,” he remembers, where parents converged to be either reunited with their children or not. Murphy saw and heard things there—things he does not specify—that still haunt him.
In the decade since, Murphy has been thrust into the role of David to the gun lobby and GOP’s Goliath. “I’ve been pretty candid about the fact that when I look back on my time in public service, it will be this issue and my success or failure that probably determines whether I think that I measured up as a member of Congress,” he tells me. Seeping himself in the trauma of gun violence is “pretty heavy,” Murphy concedes. “There’s a lot of times when I wish another issue had found me…but there’s also an opportunity right now. There’s a sense of urgency in the country.”
In the wake of Uvalde, Murphy vows during our call to “work every minute of every single day” to broker a bipartisan anti-gun-violence measure. He summons hope, even though he’s been in this position before—fighting against all odds—including when a bid for national background checks backed by the parents of Sandy Hook’s six-and seven-year-old victims failed in 2013.
Instead of discouraging Murphy, it drove him. Minutes after the bill failed, Murphy walked out of the Senate chamber to console a group of Sandy Hook parents. Mark Barden, the father of seven-year-old Daniel Barden and cofounder and CEO of Sandy Hook Promise, made a pledge to Murphy. “Chris, just understand, I’m not an activist for four months. I’m an activist for 40 years. I’m in this forever,” Murphy recalls Barden saying. “I’ll never forget that conversation because I walked away realizing that if there’s a single Sandy Hook parent who’s decided to be in this for the long haul, no matter how many times we meet failure, then I’m in it for the long haul too.”
A week and one day after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, the Senate adjourned for Memorial Day recess. On a quiet street in the Connecticut capital of Hartford, Murphy—in a blazer, slim khakis, and brown oxford shoes with blue laces—stands behind a podium outside the Environmental Sciences Magnet School at Mary Hooker, a brick-and-stone middle school.
He is there with Barden and a gaggle of local reporters on a cool, gray Wednesday morning to support Sandy Hook Promise’s Say Something initiative. The program trains middle and high schoolers to recognize the warning signs of gun violence (in four of five school shootings, according to the nonprofit, the attacker has told others about their plans beforehand) and anonymously report them to a 24/7 crisis center staffed by professional counselors.
A group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders are there too, standing in a horizontal line with mushroom haircuts and headscarves and smiling eyes over their masks. They look terribly young to be privy to the adults’ references to high-capacity magazines and gun-involved suicides, but in the absence of governmental protections, they have been enlisted to fight for their own safety. According to Barden, Say Something has helped prevent nine school shootings and hundreds of suicides.
The heightened emotion in Murphy’s viral speech has simmered into pragmatism. “Listen, laws are important, but there’s so much that can change without a single law being passed,” he tells me. For perspective, after his initial legislative setbacks, Murphy studied past social-change movements, like civil rights and marriage equality. “None of those movements succeeded in their first decade,” he said. “They stuck it out year after year, obstacle after obstacle, and, eventually, they found victory.”
Congress failed to produce gun-reform legislation in the aftermath of Barden’s son’s murder—“my little Daniel,” as Barden refers to him many times in our conversation, his blue eyes periodically brimming with tears. That hasn’t deterred Barden in his mission to make gun violence socially and culturally unacceptable, like drunk driving or not wearing a seat belt—to try, unceasingly, to protect other children and families. Daniel was a “keeper of living things,” Barden remembers. He picked worms up off the sidewalk so they wouldn’t burn and carried carpenter ants outside to be with their families. “I need to continue that work for him,” Barden says.
Meanwhile, Murphy is methodically continuing his efforts to craft a bipartisan bill. “I don’t want to say who it was, but as I was standing at the press conference, a Republican Senate colleague called me,” Murphy shares. “Normally, I’m the one making all the calls. This time around, I’m getting calls from Republicans.”
Murphy has observed a shift since Uvalde. He believes that there could be a breakthrough in the Senate, even after Sandy Hook and Parkland and Pulse and Charleston and countless others failed to move GOP lawmakers. “This is a different moment,” Murphy says. “I’ve seen enough talks fall apart in the past to not be overly optimistic, but this is definitely different.” What has changed? The sheer “accumulation of these high-profile incidents,” he posits: the back-to-back attacks on Uvalde and a Buffalo supermarket, which killed 10 Black people. Murphy credits the movement that survivors and families and gun-reform advocates have built in the decade since Sandy Hook. “It’s a lot easier to come to the table now as a Republican than it was in 2013,” when only one Republican—Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey—engaged with Murphy and his fellow Democrats. Now, Murphy notes, there are 6 to 12 Republicans attracted by his promise to seek consensus on “incremental changes” like red-flag laws.
It means Murphy must swallow his own support for more sweeping, albeit still common-sense reforms like universal background checks or an assault-weapons ban. “I have no choice,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t get drafted for this job. I signed up for it.”
When Murphy goes home to his family in D.C., he tries to take a 30-minute evening run to clear his head. He does homework with his sons and makes plans to chaperone their field trips. Murphy wants to believe his work brings some measure of security to his children. “I hope they find some comfort in the fact that their dad goes to work every day, trying to make them and their classmates safer."
