Drug Quality and Security Act-- Motion to Proceed-- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, reports are emerging of another school shooting today. Early reports out of Pittsburgh are that three people have been shot at a high school. The police right now are searching for the shooter in the woods surrounding the high school. We hope and we pray that the three reported victims will survive.

This is becoming part of our regular work week in Washington; that we can expect at some point during the week that we are going to turn on the TV to one of the cable news networks and find a live report from a school or a mall or a church somewhere in this country where a shooting is in progress. It is happening at a rate I don't think any of us could have expected. This number is growing at a rate I don't think any of us could have expected.

I brought this chart to the floor of the Senate for about 6 months since the failure of our commonsense anti-gun violence bill this spring. This number represents the number of Americans who have died of gun violence since December 14.

December 14 means something to everybody in this Chamber but certainly to those of us from Connecticut. That is the day in which 26 6- and 7-year-olds and the teachers who protected them died in Sandy Hook--10,465 additional people have died.

I have tried to come down to the Senate floor since the failure of that bill to try to tell the stories of these victims. If statistics don't do the job, if the sheer numbers alone don't convince people that something should change, then maybe hearing about who these people are might change things. We hope we will not add to this number with some new young victims from the reported shooting in Pittsburgh today.

These shootings happen in unlikely places. Schools, now, unfortunately, are a likely place for a shooting to happen because they seem to happen with some regularity in schools, in part because we do very little, if anything, to stop them with legislation from this Chamber.

They are happening in other unlikely places as well. Clubs--for instance, in New Haven, CT--have been the site four times just this year of major shootings. Only a few weeks ago, on October 26, police in New Haven responded to an early Saturday morning shooting at a place called the Key Club Cabaret. They arrived and found that 26-year-old Erika Robinson had been killed in a shooting spree that also injured 19-year-old Amanda John, 29-year-old Jahad Brumsey, 24-year-old Nijia Ward, 34-year-old Albert Dickerson, as well as 25-year-old Ivette Sterling.

Officers rushed to the scene as hundreds of patrons were running out. They walked in and found six victims of gun violence--a dispute in a club resulting in the death of Erika Robinson and several more being injured.

Only a few days ago, in Cypress, TX, there was another shooting at a house party in which two high school students were killed and 19 others were injured shortly before 11 p.m. on November 9, 2013. There was a house party celebrating a young woman's 18th birthday.

And because of a local dispute between two rival groups, Qu'eric Danarius Bernard Richardson, 17 years old, was killed, and Arielle Shepherd as well. According to authorities, Richardson was shot in the head while he was running away from the house party. When students returned to school on Monday, there was a lot of crying as they mourned the death of two of their classmates.

School parties celebrating 18th birthdays, clubs in places like New Haven and Bridgeport, CT--not places you think of going where you might end up being shot at when you walk into them--are now the scenes of pretty vicious shootings, as are our schools.

And shootings are increasingly happening in another way as well--by accident. Unfortunately, in preparation for a lot of these speeches, I riffle through a lot of pretty grizzly reports and increasingly I am seeing more and more accidental shootings ending up in tragedy. In Waterbury, CT, again, just a few weeks ago, Dow Kling and Shawn French, both 22 years old, were playing around with their .22 caliber Ruger inside an apartment in Waterbury when the gun went off and Dow was shot to death. His best friend Shawn French, who shot him, said:

I'm sorry. I wish it was me and not him. I wish I could trade places with him, I really do.

A week earlier, in Henderson, NV, another example where Cherish Pincombe was playing around with a gun with her friend Colin Lowrey. The Remington .45 was loaded. They didn't know it was loaded, and Colin shot Cherish dead, 23 years old. She was described as follows:

An amazing coworker. She was so caring. She was kind. She was always helpful. She always wanted to do something to help you out. She was very generous.

And just because they didn't understand the gun was loaded, and they were being reckless and playing around with a firearm, Cherish is dead.

So that is why people out there don't understand why we can't have an honest conversation about change. Even when those conversations are attempting to take place, they get shut down and cut off. A pretty innocent op-ed piece in the Guns & Ammo magazine suggested that maybe people should get a few hours of training before they get a concealed carry permit. As a consequence of running that editorial, the editor of Guns & Ammo had to resign and step down, simply because he ran an op-ed by an author that suggested maybe people should get some training before they have a concealed weapon.

So even when we try to engage in these discussions, we can't have them because the folks who get their money from the gun industry, whether it be the NRA or these magazines, aren't even allowed to have these conversations, despite the fact that 84 percent of gun owners support universal background checks, despite the fact that 50 percent of gun owners support a restriction on high-capacity ammunition clips, despite the fact that 46 percent of gun owners think it is a good idea to ban high-powered assault weapons.

Organizations such as Guns & Ammo and the NRA are out of step with gun owners who don't want to see this number continue increasing, who don't want to turn on the TV and see another school shooting.

The reason I come here to talk about who these victims are is because the conscience of this Nation should be enough to move this place to action, and it is about time gun owners and nongun owners alike get together to do something about this. There is much more agreement than there is disagreement among both people who own guns and people who choose not to own guns. Whether it is background checks or a ban on illegal gun trafficking or just a simple requirement that you get a little bit of training on how to use a gun so you don't fire it accidentally and end up shooting your best friend, there are simple commonsense bipartisan things we can do to make sure this number doesn't continue to accelerate at the pace that it has since December 14.

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

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