HARTFORD–U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday joined ABC’s This Week and CBS’ Face the Nation to discuss the tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas and the urgency for Congress to act.
On bipartisan negotiations in the Senate, Murphy said: “[T]here are more Republicans interested in talking about finding a path forward this time than I have ever seen since Sandy Hook. And while, in the end, I may end up being heartbroken, I am at the table in a more significant way right now with Republicans and Democrats than ever before. Certainly many more Republicans willing to talk right now than were willing to talk after Sandy Hook.”
“These are serious negotiations, and we are going to continue to meet through early next week to try to find some common ground. Now listen, I've been clear, I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Murphy added. “But what we're talking about is not insignificant. Inside this room, we're talking about red flag laws. We're talking about strengthening and expanding the background check system, if not universal background checks. We're talking about safe storage. And yes, we're also talking about mental health resources and more security dollars for schools. A package that really in the end could have a significant downward pressure on gun violence in this country and break the logjam.”
On the traumatic impact on communities that experience mass shootings and gun violence, Murphy said: “Especially in these smaller towns, I just think it's important to understand how communities can't come back from this because data says everybody that's killed has twenty people that experience diagnosable trauma because of that murder. But in these schools, every single kid in Sandy Hook and Uvalde heard those gunshots. They all know the kids that died...Of course, the same thing can be said of neighborhoods like the one that I live in in the South End of Hartford. These are neighborhoods where kids fear for their life every single day when they walk to and from school.”
Murphy continued: “So we need to understand we are putting on top of kids today, who already are living in an era of social media and pandemics, a level of trauma and fear that makes it very difficult for them to learn when they are in school. I've got two school-aged kids, you've got young kids, and the idea that they have to worry about where they're going to run in their school if a shooter walks in, instead of worrying about how they're going to do on a test that day – it only happens in America. And when a shooting like this happens in a neighborhood or in a school, those communities never, ever recover. That's just the reality.”
Murphy pushed back on whether the gun reforms being considered would have stopped the shooting in Uvalde: “I just don't get into the trap of having to write a law for the last mass shooting that captured the nation's attention. What I know is that on the same day of the shooting in Uvalde there were a hundred plus other people in this country who died and their mothers and fathers are grieving just as hard as the parents in Uvalde. So by tightening up the nation's background checks, data shows us that we will save thousands of lives...So no one law is going to save everybody, but there's a lot of lives to be saved by the things that are on the table in these negotiations.”
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