Gun Violence

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, we are now deep in the heart of summer vacation for millions of families and students all across this country. It is a wonderful time, something families look forward to--maybe some parents more so than others. But it is a very strange summer in Newtown, CT. It is the first summer that 20 families are waking up every morning without a 6- or 7-year-old they planned on spending days at the beach or afternoons at the park with or mornings getting ready for what would have been their second-grade year. It is a very different summer, this summer in Newtown, CT.

A lot of people ask me: How is the community recovering? How are they coming back? And while there is some rebound happening, it is still very much a community in crisis. When students go back to school in the fall, they are not going to be going back to Sandy Hook Elementary School. That school is going to be knocked down. There is no way families, teachers, and administrators can return to that place. So once again this fall the students of Sandy Hook Elementary School will be bused one town over to a school that was, up until January of this last year, a place none of them had seen, and they will once again be in a year of transition--once again, for many families, still a year of crisis.

I am not sure any of those families could imagine in the days and weeks after the shooting on December 14 of last year that when they sent their kids back to school--their surviving brothers and sisters--in the fall of 2013, that in that intervening time, in response to the most vicious mass school shooting in this country's history, the response from the Congress would be nothing, zippo, zero.

This is a summer of crisis in Newtown. It will be another difficult fall. But what leaves people in Newtown shaking their heads is that this place has done absolutely nothing; that when their kids return back to school, the laws of this Nation will be no different, will do nothing more to protect their sons and daughters when they and millions of other kids across the country return to school in September.

And it is not as though we have not seen since Newtown more evidence for why we need to change our laws. I have come to the floor virtually every week since this horrific incident to remind people that the tragedy has not ended; that since December 14, 5,893 people have been senselessly killed by guns. Since December 14, 5,893 people have been killed through gun violence.

I think we should continue to talk about who these people are; that we should give voices to these victims, so that it is not just the 20 6-year-old and 7-year-old children we have all heard so much about--about Jack Pinto and Dylan Hockley, and Noah Pozner and Grace McDonnell. We know these kids, and I will continue to talk about who they were and who they could have been, but every single day we lose about 30 more people to gun violence.

Last June we saw a mass shooting that was eerily similar to the one in Newtown--a mass shooting in Santa Monica, CA, in which five people were killed; the father and the brother of the gunman, but also three completely unrelated and innocent bystanders who just happened to be in and around the school when this young man, 23 years old, deeply disturbed, started firing, almost indiscriminately and randomly, on his way to and at the campus.

It was eerily similar because, once again, it was an assault weapon, an AR-15 model, the weapon of choice for mass assailants in this country these days. And once again he had high-capacity magazines. Reportedly, 1,300 rounds of ammunition were on his person. Every case is unique, but over and over these mass shootings are occurring with the same type of weapons and the same type of high-capacity ammunition. Yet we do nothing to acknowledge this trend.

Let me talk a second about who these people were who were killed that day in California, because they have stories that are not unlike the 5,800-plus stories I could tell on the floor, if we had time, with respect to the people who have died since December 14.

Carlos Navarro Franco was 68 years old. He was the groundskeeper at the college for 22 years. He was dedicated to two things above all--that college and his family. That is what the president of the college said after his death--everything Carlos did was for the college and for his family. He was truly a family man, the president of the college said. He was a dedicated husband, a father, and an integral part of Santa Monica's college family. He dedicated his work to the campus grounds and was enjoyed by students and visitors for two decades.

He was with his daughter that day. Marcela Franco was 26 years old and pursuing a degree in psychology at California State University. She had registered to take summer classes at the school where her father worked and she was on her way with her father to buy textbooks that day. She initially survived the gunfire but she never regained consciousness after the attack. She was described by her aunt as smart, beautiful, and outgoing. Her aunt said, ``She was daddy's girl.'' So the blessing is they went together.

Margarita Gomez was the same age as Carlos Navarro Franco. She lost her life that day. She was fondly referred to on campus as the ``recycle lady'' because she could be seen almost every weekday walking around campus, rolling her cart, picking up used bottles and cans. She would plop them in her cart and then take them to get recycled. Obviously, most people thought she was homeless and that she was collecting these bottles and cans as a means to be able to survive, but that wasn't the case. Margarita had actually been diagnosed with diabetes, and it was her doctor's recommendation that she exercise more. She was also an active member of a senior Latino club that met every Thursday at the Virginia Avenue park and she was very interested in the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital cause--a charity the senior Latino club happened to give money to. So she put these two things

together--a recommendation she should exercise more and an interest in helping this club and the charity it was affiliated with--and decided she would take this cart around town for exercise, pick up cans and bottles, recycle them, and then donate the money to charity.

The ``recycle lady,'' Margarita Gomez, was walking around campus that day picking up cans and bottles so she could donate the money to help sick kids, and she was gunned down by an assailant using an assault weapon with high-capacity ammunition clips. It is a pretty unbelievable story. These three special individuals, along with the father and the son, are among the 5,893.

But it is not just the mass shootings that we are talking about. Frankly, the vast majority of these killings are one-off deals over some of the most petty arguments or disputes one could imagine. But because guns are so easily found, so readily accessible in our neighborhoods, these silly arguments end up in deaths, such as one that happened in my State of Connecticut just a couple weeks ago on June 16.

Isaac Smith was a couple days away from graduating from New Britain High School. He was a great athlete, played football and baseball, and he was hoping to continue playing those sports after high school when he went to college. He apparently talked to his friends a lot about how proud he was going to be to graduate.

On the night of June 16, police received a call around midnight about gunshots. They arrived at the scene and found Isaac Smith--a couple days away from graduation--in his driveway with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. Police are still trying to figure out what happened. Apparently, he was involved in a transaction for a pair of high-end sneakers when something went wrong and the other guy he was either selling the sneakers to or buying the sneakers from, 26-year-old Jonathan Gibbs of Meriden, shot him--over a pair of sneakers.

These are who these 5,893 people are: They are victims of mass violence, they are victims of senseless gunfire, and they all share something in common. They deserve a response from the Senate and the House of Representatives. They deserve us doing something more than nothing.

At least the Senate brought up a bill on the floor earlier this year. We got 55 votes for a bill that wasn't perfect, but it at least said criminals shouldn't have guns and that we should have a system that makes sure that is the case; that gun trafficking--when someone buys a messload of guns legally and then sells them illegally on the streets of our cities--should probably be a Federal crime; that we should have more resources in our mental health system to take care of people who want and need help. We got 55 votes for that, which is pretty unbelievable given the fact that 90 percent of the American public support all of those things. One would think we could have gotten more than 55 votes.

The House of Representatives has done nothing. It hasn't even had a debate.

These numbers will continue to mount. Next week I will be down here, and the number will probably be north of 6,000. Then, after the August recess, it will be creeping up to 7,000. We can't get rid of every single one of these deaths.

I will admit to you that Jonathan Gibbs who shot Isaac Smith was a legal gun owner. He didn't even actually have a criminal history. The fact is, while not every single one of these deaths is preventable, many of them are.

So I will continue to come down and talk about these victims with the hope that someday--perhaps this fall, perhaps next year, perhaps the year after--we can take action in the Senate that will maybe not stop the growth of this number but will at least slow its acceleration.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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