CNN "State of the Union with Candy Crowley" Transcript: Newtown, Gun Control and the NRA

Interview

CROWLEY: Tomorrow marks one month since the deadly rampage at Sandy Hook elementary school. Newtown, Connecticut, has done what no other shooting has, prompted what may be decisive changes to gun laws.

Joining me now is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. Senator, you are in Newtown today and I appreciate you taking the time.

Let me get a quick update from you about what we know. It has been a month. Are we any closer to understanding what motivated this shooter?

MURPHY: This is an ongoing investigation, and I think it has been very difficult for the police to find out the motive here. This guy did a pretty good job of destroying a lot of the evidence, his computer which he may have done a lot of gaming and correspondence on was ruined by the time that they got to the house. And although we expect that there will be a report, and the families desperately want as much information as they can get, we haven't gotten much yet. This community is still really grieving. This is certainly about the families of the little boys and girls who are lost, but it is also about teachers and administrators and first responders who may be in the fury of the days and weeks after the shooting didn't exactly understand how deeply this had affected them. This is going to take a long time even after that report comes out for this community to recover.

CROWLEY: Right. And the other question that I think is still outstanding there, is there any evidence that the shooter sought mental assistance or that his mother sought it for him? Was he ever in the system in any way?

MURPHY: Well, I think that's one of the big questions we're trying to answer. There certainly have been some reports that his mother understood that this was a deeply troubled individual, and that she was at or around the time of the shooting, trying to find some serious treatment option for him. But the fact is that she would have run into the roadblocks that thousands of mothers and fathers run into all across this country. There are a lot of kids who need help, and the waiting lines for mental health services are very, very long.

Clearly she knew that there was something wrong here, and was trying to figure it out, but there might not have been an option for her given the lack of funding for a lot of the services.

CROWLEY: So that turns me to what is happening in Washington now, because Newtown, you are right, it is going to take so much time to heal, and Washington has now taken up the other end of this, what can be done to prevent this, a kind of legislative look. We are hearing a lot about gun control, and I wanted to ask you because I know you heard the interview that we did with David Keene, the head of the NRA. Was there anything that he said there that you thought, OK, we can find some common ground. I should mention that you get an F from the NRA, so you are not exactly in sync with them when it comes to some of these issues, but is there some commonality there that you heard that is helpful?

MURPHY: Well, listen, if they want to work on funding for mental health services, then let's go to work on it. But what they have proposed is a national registry of everyone in this country who is mentally ill. You want to talk about an abridgment of the Bill of Rights. Let's talk about what that would mean to the people who have been diagnosed with depression, who would all of a sudden find themselves on a list.

The fact is that the NRA does not represent gun owners anymore. This is not your father's NRA. It represents gun manufacturers. Less than half of their funding comes from their members, and they make tens of millions of dollars off of the purchases of guns. But what your guest didn't tell you is that every time -- not every time, but when assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are bought in this country, often the NRA gets a cut of those sales through its round-up purchase program, where the purchase price is rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the NRA gets the difference. The NRA makes money. They pay their salaries off of these gun purchases. That is who they are representing in this debate.

CROWLEY: So, Mr. Keene also said that he believes right now that there is enough strength in the Senate and the House to block a ban -- how do we put this so it's not a double negative -- to keep a ban from assault weapons from going into place. Do you agree with that?

MURPHY: No, I think that he is wrong. I think that this issue is going to continue to move. He is right that when a president puts the full weight of their office behind legislative change, that certainly means something. And I do think that you see, even in the Democratic caucus, members like Joe Manchin and Mark Warner, who previously probably would have never considered a ban on assault weapons or high magazine -- high-capacity magazine clips now coming to the table. And even just this last week, one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives, Phil Gingrey from Georgia, said that he would be willing to look at universal background checks and high-capacity magazine clip bans.

That is a sea change if people like that in the Republican House caucus are willing to look at this. Newtown fundamentally changed things, and the NRA just does not get this. They have got to come to the table on gun control, just as they are saying they are coming to the table on mental health, because their previous allies and backers in the House and the Senate are not with them anymore, just like (inaudible).

CROWLEY: And so let me ask you, because I know that Senator Feinstein and Senator Blumenthal are about to introduce a ban on assault weapons, what do you know about that piece of legislation?

MURPHY: Well, I'm going to be a supporter of that piece of legislation.

CROWLEY: What's in it?

MURPHY: This is a -- this I think will be a ban on assault weapons moving forward. It's a tighter ban than the previous ban, and it will address high-capacity ma magazine clips.

The fact is that as soon as we passed that ban back in the 1990s, the gun manufacturers found a way around it, and other states like New Jersey and California have passed much stricter bans, and that is what the Congress needs to do.

I get it. The NRA is going to use all of their resources to try to stop this thing, but ultimately, the people of this country have been transformed, and these assault weapons -- and they know it -- these are not used by sportsmen. You don't need an assault weapon to kill a deer, you don't need an assault weapon to do target practice. Sportsmen are not going to have their rights abridged or their ability to enjoy their sport changed by having these dangerous, military-style assault weapons taken off of the streets. CROWLEY: So, let me ask you a little bit back on the mental health issue. Does it concern you that when we are hearing things from the Biden panel, we are not hearing a lot about improving mental health services so that women like the mother of the shooter could maybe find some help? We're not hearing a lot about these videos that seem to have some sort of effect, at least on those whose minds are already a little warped. So are you concerned that this is going to become only a gun control issue?

MURPHY: I definitely want to hear us talk about mental health, because, you know, we are coming into lean budget times, and there is always I think a tendency and a risk to go after those line items that support mental health services first in these debates, so I definitely want that to be on the table.

But let's be honest, we are not always going to be able to find these individuals who on a dime turn into mad men, and what could have helped here in Newtown is a ban on assault weapons.

I have got to tell you, I fundamentally believe that if we had a ban on assault weapons and a ban on high-capacity magazine clips, this guy might never, ever have taken up arms to begin with, because what happens is these guys start to get courageous when they believe that they can walk into a school or to a movie theater with the kind of weapons that they see in these video games. There would still be little boys and girls alive in Newtown today, I believe, if you had banned assault weapons and these high-capacity magazine clips, and that is something that we can do and do now.

CROWLEY: Senator Chris Murphy, new senator from Connecticut, thanks for joining us from Newtown today.

MURPHY: Thanks, Candy.

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