Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, rightfully, when we talk about the issue of gun violence in this country, we think about it through the prism of those lives that have been lost because the numbers are just stunning. They are hard to get your head wrapped around.

Here are the rough numbers in front of me. On an average year, we have 39,000 people who lose their lives through a gunshot wound. That is a suicide, a homicide, an accidental shooting, domestic violence crimes. If you break it down, that is around 100 people a day, and there is no other high-income nation in the world that comes anywhere close.

We talk about the issue of gun violence through the prism of people whose lives have been lost because it is so morally disrupting, cataclysmic, when you have a loved one--normally, a young loved one, a brother or sister, a child--who is there one instant and then gone the next because of a random shooting.

I always get drawn back to the people whom I have been lucky enough to have had access to and friendships with in Connecticut. One of them is Janet Rice.

Janet lost her son Shane, who was 20 at the time, to a gunshot wound back in 2012. It was actually only a month and a half before the Sandy Hook shooting.

Shane was just selling a car to some acquaintances, and the conversation went off the rails. There was some pushing and shoving. There was a gun fired, and Shane was dead.

It is really hard for Janet to describe how her life changed. She talks a lot about in those early months and years really not being able to even leave the house. She would drive a couple of blocks to the corner grocery store because she just didn't want to walk down the street and encounter friends and have to talk about what happened.

She had this habit of waking up in th middle of the night and driving her car down to where Shane was shot, which is only about two blocks from where I live in Hartford. She would arrive there in the middle of the night, she would pull up in the parking lot, and she would turn on her high beams, half expecting that Shane was going to show up.

Her life is fundamentally different today than it was when Shane was in her life. And I have no idea what it is like to lose a child. I have no idea what it is like to lose a loved one to gun violence. But we talk about it in these terms because it is absolutely catastrophic when you lose somebody that way.

This week, though, is Gun Violence Survivors Week. This week we focus on those who survived gunshot wounds, and I think I hate to tell you this, but the numbers are much worse. More people survive gunshot wounds than are killed by gunshot wounds, and that wound can change your life as well.

It can inflict you with physical pain that you can never get over, render you unable to walk, and in our colleague Gabby Giffords' case, almost unable to speak. But it can also inflict you with an ongoing, cascading trauma from which you may never recover.

James Harris was shot in Hartford in 2018. He was shot while he and another friend were just hanging out in the hallway of the friend's apartment building, when a man showed up and shot James and his friend. The man was charged with a whole bunch of things, including possession of an illegal firearm. But they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

His friend lost his life. James survived and, to this day, he experiences post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain, and mental health challenges that I don't think anybody in this Chamber can get their head wrapped around.

Tyrek Marquez was shot in the head a decade earlier, in Hartford, when Tyrek was 7 years old, following a West Indian Day parade in Hartford in the summer of 2008.

Guess what. The three shooters who were arrested were all found to have illegal firearms. One of the guns they found in the perpetuation of that crime had been used in 14 other crimes.

It is a decade later, and Tyrek remains partially paralyzed on the left side of his body. But he is part of the anti-gun violence movement. He survived, and he wants to make sure that this never happens to anybody ever again. ``You've got to overcome obstacles and that's what I have been'' able to do, he says.

There are 100 people a day who die from guns, but there are just as many who survive gunshot wounds, and they are now demanding that something change.

Right now, as we debate a COVID relief package, our focus, rightfully, is squarely on trying to reverse the disturbing trend of this virus expanding all across this country and righting the economic ship of this country. But not coincidental to the pandemic and the economic meltdown, we saw a dramatic increase in homicides. Some cities reported 40, 50 percent increases in homicides in 2020 versus 2019. You saw record numbers of gun sales. Those two things are not coincidental. And those are just the reportable gun sales. Likely, we saw a dramatic spike in illegal gun transfers as well. More weapons equals more gun crimes in this country.

And so knowing that 20, 30 percent of guns get transferred outside of the legal system, knowing that, as in the case of Tyrek and James, it was illegal guns that ended up being used to shoot them, as it was for Shane Oliver in Hartford--that mother I talked about, Janet Rice; Shane was killed with an illegal gun--to honor Gun Violence Survivors Week, we have to make a plan this year. We have to make a plan to work on an issue that can bring us all together.

I hope that Republicans join us in voting for COVID relief funding. The things in President Biden's package are supported by 70 percent of the American public. That is impressive. It is really hard to get the American public to agree on anything at a 70-percent rate. They have actually done polling on things like kittens and baseball and grandmas, and it is hard to get 70 percent support for that stuff. So on Joe Biden's agenda, boy, it must be pretty popular to get 70 percent of the American public supporting it.

Universal background checks, requiring that everybody have to prove you are not a criminal or seriously mentally ill before you buy a gun-- that has 90 to 95 percent support. Think about that. That means that the vast majority of gun owners, of NRA members, of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, all support universal background checks. It is something that this body can come together on.

And just like in Tyrek and James's case, every single day we are presented with evidence of what happens when we let these illegal guns flow on to our streets. In Pennsylvania, a man purchased two handguns advertised in a classified ad. He used those guns to kill a person and wound seven others inside a psychiatric institute. He had failed a background check at a gun store just a few months prior.

In Illinois, a man killed a Chicago police commander with a gun he purchased online. He was prohibited from buying a gun because he had a restraining order.

Wisconsin, a man killed his wife and two other women and wounded four others with a gun that he purchased outside the background system. Why? Because he was prohibited from purchasing a gun because of a domestic violence restraining order.

In Texas, a man killed 7 people and injured 22 others after being fired from his job. He had failed a background check but was able to find an unlicensed seller.

I can go on. Over and over and over again, the victims of gun violence are very often put at risk and put in harm's way because there are so many guns being sold illegally or so many guns being sold legally to people who shouldn't have them, like people with serious, violent criminal records and people who have been arrested for things like domestic violence.

So, right now, our priority has to be COVID relief, but as we take part this week in Gun Violence Survivors Week, we have to recognize that the status quo is not acceptable and that there is something fundamentally wrong with democracy if a public policy measure can enjoy 90 percent support amongst the American public, and it can't get passed through the representative bodies that are assembled in the Nation's Capitol.

Thirty-nine thousand people die every year. More are injured and survive. And we owe them, in 2021, to pass legislation that finally starts putting these trajectories downward.

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