National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, about a week ago, Josh Cortez was found shot and lying on the pavement in Hartford's South end. Josh was 22 at the time. His girlfriend, who was 23 years old, was found in a parked car nearby with a gunshot wound. She was rushed to Hartford Hospital where she died a half hour later. They were the sixth and seventh homicide victims in Hartford this year.
They had been dating for about 2 years, and they had a 2-year-old daughter. He had just celebrated his 22nd birthday. His cousin said:
[Josh] was a great kid. He turned his life around for the better. He had a rough start, but he was doing a complete 360 for his baby girl.
His cousin said that he was just wrapping up a jail diversionary program at the time of his death and that he was ``committed to the program,'' making every appointment and following every regulation.
Two days later, across the country in Iowa, Senquez Jackson was 15 years old when his 13-year-old friend accidentally fired a small .38- caliber semiautomatic pistol. His friend thought the gun was unloaded when he pulled the ammo clip from the handle. He killed his friend, Senquez, who was 15 years old, and now that 13-year-old boy has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. In addition, they layered on charges of obstructing prosecution and carrying a weapon.
Senquez is remembered by his friends and family as being a great athlete. He loved basketball. He dreamed of playing in the NBA. He always told his auntie that he was going to be just like LeBron James.
One speaker at his funeral said that they had never met another child with more gratitude than Senquez. He had deep gratitude for the things he had been given. He died from an accidental gunshot wound on March 18.
Earlier in the year, Romell Jones was standing outside the Alton Acres housing complex with a group of kids his age in Alton, IL. He was 11 years old. They were waiting to get picked up to go to basketball practice. While they were waiting outside, a red car pulled up and someone inside the car fired multiple shots into this group of kids, and Romell was killed.
His friends remember him--frankly, like Senquez--as always having a basketball in his hands. The middle school coach, Bobby Everage, who was planning on coaching this incredibly talented kid, said:
This young man's life was cut short and he had so much potential. I know he was a good kid and has a lot of friends. When life ends that way, it is so sad.
His fifth grade teacher said that Romell was well liked by all of his teachers and all of his classmates.
He was always happy, sensitive, and an excellent student. As a fifth grader he mentored younger students at our school.
He was only 11 years old when he was killed while waiting to go to basketball practice.
At the end of last year--this is a story I pulled out of the dozens that were killed in Connecticut cities--Antoine Heath was 29 years old when he was shot in the chest while sitting in a parked car on the outskirts of Edgewood Park in New Haven. His wife of 4 years and mother of his two children, ages 4 and 3, said that her husband was a family man. ``He was loving and hard working.''
Antoine's nickname was ``Champ,'' in large part because he was such a champion of causes in and around his community. A childhood friend said:
He tried to get me to see things clear. He made sure everybody was all right. He just wanted his family to be together.
He had big plans for the weekend just following his death. He was going to be baptized. His sister said:
He was ready to give his life over to God, and he made the decision on his own. That was something he wanted to surprise the family and do.
Those are just four stories--four voices--of victims of gun violence. As the Presiding Officer and many of my colleagues know, I try to come to the floor every week or couple of weeks to tell a handful of stories of the 31,000 a year, 2,600 a month, and 86 people a day who are killed by guns, resulting from a variety of reasons. Most of these are suicides, many of them accidental. They happen in large numbers and small. Last year we had 372 mass shootings, which I categorize as 4 or more people being shot at any one time. Many of these are domestic violence incidents or gang-involved incidents. There are a lot of different stories as to why this happens.
I come to the floor to talk for a moment today on a specific aspect of our path forward on addressing gun violence. Tomorrow Senator Cassidy and I will host a summit here in Washington on mental health reform. Senator Cassidy and I, with the help of 16 of our colleagues-- eight Democrats and eight Republicans--have introduced a bipartisan comprehensive mental health reform act that we think, if it passes, will dramatically improve the experiences of individuals who are trying to seek help for their mental illness.
Given the fact that we are going to have hundreds of people at this summit tomorrow, that many of us are living with the daily ramifications of unchecked gun violence, and that we are continuing to press for legislation on this floor--as I know the Presiding Officer is--I want to talk about the mistakes I think we make in how we talk about the intersection between mental health and the epidemic of gun violence.
I will talk about it for a second through the lens of Sandy Hook. On the same day that Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 children and educators, another mentally ill man in Henan, China, walked into a school and attacked 22 students--almost the same number. Now, in Sandy Hook, every single child who Adam Lanza fired a bullet at and hit died. In China, every single student survived. Both assailants were unquestionably deeply mentally ill, but only one incident resulted in a worldwide tragedy. The difference is that Adam Lanza walked into that school with a semiautomatic rifle, and the attacker in China walked into that school with a knife.
Our Nation has seen the horror that unfolds when mental illness and gun violence intersect in devastating ways and the cycles of shock, despair, horror, and grief that accompany mass shootings are still a uniquely American routine. We can't fathom what would drive someone to commit such horrifying acts. It is easy for society to blame that shooting in Newtown or in Aurora or wherever the next one may be on the mental illness. If we truly want to stop these mass shootings and do something about the 86 people who are murdered every day, we have to stop ourselves for a second and ask why this epidemic of gun violence doesn't happen in any other industrialized country the way it happens here. We have to ask ourselves: Is it because more Americans suffer from mental illness? No, the statistics don't tell us that. Is it because the mentally ill in America are more violent than the mentally ill in a place like Europe? No, the data doesn't tell us that. Do other countries spend more money on treating mental illness than the United States does? Is it that their systems are more adequate than ours? No, the data doesn't tell us that either.
What is the difference between the United States and every other developed nation? Why is our gun homicide rate 20 times higher than the average OECD nation? Why don't other countries that experience the same level of mental illness and spend the same amount of money treating it have a comparable number of shootings--mass and individual shootings? Well, one of the differences is guns. The difference is that in America we are awash in illegal guns--high-power military-style assault firearms that are designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible. The reality is that whoever shot that couple in Hartford or that father New Haven didn't have to try very hard to find a weapon. It was either in their house or around the corner or at a friend's apartment.
There are a lot of people who would like to very easily conflate the conversation about gun violence with the conversation about fixing our mental health system. Let's just think about two States: Wisconsin and Wyoming. These are States that have very similar mental health systems and spend the same amount of money. Yet one State, Wyoming, has a gun homicide rate that is twice that of Wisconsin. There is no data that suggests that mental illness explains the difference between those two States, just like there is no evidence that mental illness explains the difference between two countries.
This argument about an inadequate mental health system being the reason for epidemic rates of gun violence has become a very convenient political fate that is perpetrated by people who don't want to get to the question of whether our gun laws have something to do with these epidemic murder rates.
There is no doubt that the mental health system in this country is broken. It is dramatically under-resourced. People have to wait for months to get an outpatient appointment. We have closed down 4,000 mental health inpatient beds in this country just in the last 5 years alone. It is ridiculously uncoordinated. We have built up a system in which your body from the neck down is treated in one system, and then you have to drive two towns over if you want to get treatment for your body from the neck up. People with mental illness die 20 years earlier than people without mental illness because those two systems are not coordinated.
The stigma around mental illness is still crippling. I know we passed a law that requires insurance companies to say on your statement of benefits that you have coverage for mental illness. Everybody knows that when you actually try to access those benefits, bureaucrats put up bureaucratic hurdles in front of your actually getting reimbursed for mental health care that they never would if you were trying to get reimbursed for a broken leg or heart surgery.
Now, fortunately, the Mental Health Reform Act, which this summit will cover tomorrow, really does start to unlock many of these most difficult problems. The Mental Health Reform Act will properly capitalize our mental health system by putting back into it funding for inpatient beds and starting to marry the physical health system with the mental health system. It attacks this stigma by requiring insurance companies to administer benefits in the spirit of parity and not just say that you have a mental health benefit. It invests in prevention and early intervention and treatments so that we are not just hitting the problem at the back end. It gets into tough issues, like how our HIPAA laws unfortunately stand in the way of caregivers actually being part of the treatment plan for their seriously mentally ill young adults.
The Mental Health Reform Act is a path forward to fixing our broken mental health system. But pretending that mental health reform is a sufficient response to gun violence is not only wrongheaded, it is also dangerous because the facts are incontrovertible that individuals coping with serious mental illness commit less than 5 percent of all violent acts in this country.
Let me say that again. People with mental illness commit less than 5 percent of all violent acts in this country. They are frankly far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than they are to be the perpetrators of it.
Obviously, people like Adam Lanza, Jared Lee Loughner, and James Holmes had complicated and devastating behavioral health disorders. There are Adam Lanzas, Jared Loughners, and James Holmeses in every other country in the world, but in these other societies mental illness doesn't lead to mass murder. Something is different in America such that people who are coping with mental illness turn to a weapon. This celebratory culture of firearms and violence, this easy access to weapons of war that enable men and women with a severe mental illness to instantly transform themselves into mass murderers is unique in this country.
Even if Congress passed a bill today that magically eliminated all mental illness in the United States, our country would still have more gun violence and shooting deaths than any other country in the developed world. Given that only 5 percent of these crimes are perpetrated by people with severe mental illness, curing mental illness would be a remarkable achievement, but it wouldn't solve this problem.
It is even worse than that because draping the scourge of gun deaths around the necks of everyday Americans who are struggling with mental illness just increases the stigma I was talking about that surrounds disorders of the mind. Scapegoating the 44 million Americans with mental illness just reinforces the idea that they should be feared rather than treated.
We have a mental health crisis in this Nation, and we have a gun violence crisis as well. These two epidemics overlap--there is no doubt about that--but solving one, the mental health epidemic, doesn't solve the other. And conflating mental illness and gun violence may serve the political ends of those who don't want to have a conversation on this floor about background checks or assault weapons or more resources for the ATF, but it is not going to make America any demonstrably safer.
I think this is a very important conversation to have, and I don't want to shy away from these intersections that exist, but I want to get it right. In the end, I want this body to commit itself to solving our mental health crisis and then doing what is additionally necessary to do something about the 31,000 a year, 2,600 a month, and the 86 a day who are killed by guns in this country.
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