Joseph Woodrow Hatchett United States Courthouse and Federal Building--

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, 4 weeks ago, I was sitting where you are sitting, presiding over the Senate on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, when news broke that 19 children--all the same age as my youngest son--had been gunned down in their Texas elementary school.

As I scrolled through the early reports of the carnage, all I could think of were these two simple questions: What are we doing? Why are we here?

I sat up there obsessing over our willful decision as a body to ignore the slaughter that has become so regular that the news only seems to pay attention now when over a dozen die. Our collective decision year after year is to do nothing. What is the point of this job that we fought so hard to get if we just decide that saving children's lives is too hard or involves too inconvenient an amount of political risk?

Shooting after shooting, murder after murder, suicide after suicide-- for 30 years, Congress stood in its political corners and did nothing. But not this time. Within 2 days of the Uvalde massacre, Senator Cornyn, Senator Tillis, Senator Sinema, and I, joined by other Members of this body, had started talking, not about our disagreements--we have plenty of those--but instead about what could be possible if we sat together and refused to give up until we figured out the set of things that we could agree on--the things that could get 60 votes--to save lives.

I am so grateful in the bottom of my soul to John, to Thom, to Kyrsten, and the other Senators here who took part in these talks for what they did over these last 4 weeks.

I am grateful to Senator Schumer and Senator McConnell for empowering these discussions and allowing us to have this debate this week.

I am equally proud of my team--Allison and Samir, Emily and Rebecca, Pete and Elizabeth--who worked 24/7 for the last 30 days straight to get this bill done.

But mostly I am proud of the regular people all across this country, many of whom were forced to become advocates after this epidemic took from them a son or a daughter, a mother or a father. Those citizens, many of whom are watching this debate right now, who protested or wrote letters or showed up at townhalls year after year, failure after failure, roadblock after roadblock, refusing to give up because the stakes--their children's safety--was so high that they couldn't afford to give up, that is who I am really proud of today, people who would not take no for an answer and knew that the righteousness of their cause had to eventually prevail.

This bill is a compromise. It doesn't do everything I want. But what we are doing will save thousands of lives without violating anyone's Second Amendment rights.

Through more effective red flag laws, by keeping guns away from domestic abusers, by being more careful about giving weapons to 18- year-olds, by getting more people access to treatment for their mental illness, this will become the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation Congress has passed in three decades.

As a result, this bill also has the chance to prove to a weary American public that democracy is not so broken that it is unable to rise to the moment when the need for action, like right now, in the wake of Uvalde and Buffalo, is most acute.

What are we doing? Why are we here? We are answering those questions today--not fully but with enough force that anxious moms and dads and kids all across this Nation will wake up tomorrow and be a little more confident that the adults who run this country actually care about their safety, because, you know what, people still believe in us. People still count on us.

Two months after his son was gunned down by a 19-year-old with an assault rifle in Sandy Hook, one of the dads came to Congress and gave this testimony: ``Before he died,'' Neil Heslin told Congress, my son ``Jesse and I used to talk about maybe coming to Washington someday. He wanted to go up to the Washington monument. When we talked about it last year Jesse asked if we could [go] meet the President. Now I could be a little cynical about politicians. But Jesse, he believed in you. He learned about you in school and he believed in you. I want to believe in you, too. I know you can't give me Jesse back. Believe me, if I thought you could, I'd be asking you for that. But I want to believe that you will think about what happened to my son and what I've seen. I want to believe that you'll think about it and then you'll do something about it.''

What are we doing? What are we here for if not to do something-- something meaningful, something real, something together--to end this carnage.

Jesse believed in us. And, today, more so than at any time since I came to Congress 16 years ago, I believe in us too.

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