Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, before I give my intended remarks and while the Senator from Alaska is still on the floor, let me just share with him--although I probably would not have used some of the pejorative terms, let me agree with him that this distinction that has been made between combat troops and noncombat troops in the Middle East is ridiculous.

We need a more fulsome discussion on the floor of the Senate as to the scope of our deployment there. We just heard evidence last week that we have U.S. troops on the ground in Yemen in addition to Iraq and Syria. Frankly, the appropriate forum to have that discussion is a debate on an authorization of the use of military force to fight our enemies in the region.

So, while I might not share the way in which the sentiments were expressed, I think that this conversation about brave men and women-- American soldiers--putting their lives on the line as we speak in the Middle East is as important as it gets. The fact that we are not having a broader discussion about this is deeply problematic. So I thank the Senator for raising the issue. I hope it is something on which we can come together as we provide legal cover and perhaps restrictions on the use of force in the region. So I thank the Senator for bringing up this important subject. Gun Violence

Mr. President, I am here today to talk about the 21,000 people a year, 2,600 a month, 86 a day--these are rough numbers--who are killed by guns all across the country. A lot of the kids who grow up in neighborhoods like the North End of Hartford or the East End of Bridgeport--it feels like a war zone because they fear for their life every day as they are walking to school. The levels of PTSD--when virtually every one of these kids knows someone very close to them who has been shot, it rivals the diagnoses that come back from war zones abroad.

Today, in my campaign to try to bring the voices of victims to the floor of the Senate, I want to talk about one aspect of this epidemic that is all across the country; that is, the epidemic of young children being killed accidentally by guns. The numbers are really hard to believe, that in this country, in any one given year, there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 children and teens who die from guns in the United States. That does not even count all of the kids who suffer nonfatal gun injuries; in 2010, the official number was about 18,000. There is a lot of reporting that suggests that the numbers we know are dramatically lower than what the actual numbers are, that there are a lot of injuries that happen in the home because of guns that are not reported as part of the official statistics.

Here are just a handful of headlines from recent papers, including this New York Times headline: ``One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves.''

On average, last year, in 2015, people were getting shot by toddlers on a weekly basis. I think it is time that we start talking about this epidemic of young kids--as young as 1 or 2 years old--getting their hands on weapons and either killing themselves or killing their parents or their brothers or their sisters and that we start talking about the fact that this is not happening anywhere else in the world.

Here are the rates of gun deaths per 100,000--this is children and teens. We are going to take high-income countries. I mean, it is not close. Canada, our neighbor, is the next highest with 0.75 per 100,000, but 3.24 children and teens die from gun homicides, gun deaths-- accidental, intentional--every year. Other countries barely register. There is nothing unique about the nature of American children that explains this away. The only thing that can explain this is the large number of unsafe weapons that are available to children. So I want to talk for a little bit today about what is happening out there.

Here is the broader number. On average, every day 46 people are shot or killed by accident with a gun. In 2015 there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers. So these are young kids and teenagers unintentionally firing a weapon. We know there are at least 278. The New York Times found that unintentional shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate because of idiosyncrasies in terms of how such deaths from accidental shootings are classified.

We know there are about 1.7 million children and youth under the age of 18 who are living in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms. Some 1.7 million kids are in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms. A Harvard survey showed that children who live in gun-owing households, by a rate of 70 percent--these are kids under the age of 10--70 percent of kids under the age of 10 who live in households that have a gun knew where their parents stored the guns, even when they were hidden, and 36 percent of those kids under 10 years old reported that they themselves had handled the weapons. One out of three kids under 10 had found the weapon and had handled the gun. One analysis found that 70 percent of unintentional child deaths from firearms could have been prevented if that firearm had simply been stored, locked, or unloaded.

So this is a part of the story of gun violence in this country that does not often get talked about, but given this one horrific week we had in April, maybe we can have a conversation about what we can do to try to reduce the number of accidental shootings that happen at the hands of little kids. My goal in these speeches is to tell you who these victims are, so, as hard as it is, let me tell you a little bit about some of the children who passed away in this week during April.

Holston Cole was a 3-year-old from Dallas, GA, who shot himself with his father's loaded gun on April 26. The gun, according to his father, was located in a backpack. Holston removed it from the backpack and then accidentally fired the weapon. Autopsy results confirmed that the shot was both accidental and self-inflicted. After the gun fired, Holston's father called 911. I wouldn't recommend that you listen to the recording. You will hear the father wailing: ``No, no! Stay with me, Holston. Can you hear me? Daddy loves you. Holston. Holston, please. Please.''

This was a kid who was full of energy from morning until night, as his relatives described. His pastor, who officiated Holston's funeral, remembered Holston as a boy who loved superheroes and sometimes wrestled cardboard boxes. He loved to play in small, inflatable bouncy castles whenever he could.

Sha'Quille Kornegay was 2 years old when, on April 21, in Kansas City, MO, she died after accidentally shooting herself in the head with her father's gun. She had been taking a nap with her father when she found the gun under a pillow on the bed, where her father generally kept it. Her father woke up from the nap to Sha'Quille by his bed bleeding and crying, the gun at her feet. Sha'Quille's mother was devastated by her daughter's loss and noted that the daughter's first word was ``daddy.'' She was buried in a pink coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara strategically placed to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound to her forehead.

Finally, and I promise I will stop, Kiyan Shelton, 2 years old, same week, Indianapolis, IN, shot and killed himself with a handgun that he found in his mother's purse. She had briefly stepped away when the toddler climbed on to the kitchen counter and reached for his mother's purse, where her cell phone was ringing, and he found the weapon. He fired the weapon, and he was wounded in his shoulder. In critical condition, he was quickly taken to a nearby hospital, but he died shortly thereafter.

A neighbor who lived across the street remembered that Kiyan had just learned how to ride a bicycle. He was out on his little bike with training wheels. Everybody knew his mother used to keep watch of the stray dogs in the neighborhood, trying to keep her son safe. He was 2 years old. He died because he was reaching for a ringing cell phone in his mom's bag and shot himself.

There is a way to solve this. I know we are not supposed to have props on the floor, but this is a cell phone. It opens and closes based on my fingerprint. There is technology ready and available to make sure that a weapon can only be fired by the owner of that weapon. Yet there is a pretty open conspiracy in the gun industry today to prevent that technology from becoming available to consumers. Smith & Wesson tried. They tried to develop a smart weapon, but they were boycotted. They were boycotted by the rest of the gun industry. When retailers have tried to sell smart guns in their stores, they have faced boycotts regularly and in some cases even threats of physical violence.

It doesn't make sense to most people. Why on Earth would the gun industry not want--or the gun lobby not want safe guns to be an option, to be available? From what I understand, it is rooted in a law that was passed a decade ago by New Jersey that says if smart-gun technology is developed, it will be mandatory. First, that is one State's law, so there is no national conspiracy to mandate that every single gun be a smart gun. But let's play this out. Let's say that technology was developed so that you could ensure that no gun could be fired if it wasn't fired by you or another authorized user of the gun. I think it would be logical for us to have a conversation as to whether that should be mandatory. Maybe we won't develop technology that is fail- safe enough. Maybe it will always make sense to have that as an option. But when we figured out how to make cars safer, we required that technology to be built in as a part of the car.

I don't think we are to the point where we could discuss making that technology mandatory on guns, but I wouldn't suggest that it should be something we should rule out. To the extent that a retailer or a gunmaker wants to invest in understanding how to make a gun more fail- safe, how to build in this kind of technology--whether it be your fingerprint or other biometrics, other guns connected to a wristband that you may wear--they should be able to sell those. They should be able to make them without facing reprisals from the rest of the gun lobby and the gun industry.

Shouldn't we try to do something to prevent these deaths, one every week last year? That is just people who were shot by toddlers, in addition to the dozens more children who accidentally injured or killed themselves with a weapon.

I struggle to try to figure out the ways in which we can come together on this issue. I certainly understand there are difficult compromises on issues like the prohibition of certain weapons. But smart-gun technology is something on which we should be able to come together.

The President has taken steps on his own. He has started a process by which Federal agencies would help to stimulate research in smart-gun technology, maybe with the goal of a pilot program being developed at a law enforcement agency to try to buy some of these weapons. The President has taken steps on his own, but we could do something together, and we should because it is only a problem here. It is not a problem anywhere else. To me, that has to tell us that we are doing it wrong and that there is something more we can do so that this reality-- that U.S. children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than children in the 25 other high-income countries combined--isn't a reality for much longer. If there is anything we could do to stop there from being another Kiyan, another Sha'Quille, and another Holston, we should do it.

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