Connecticut's junior Senator, Chris Murphy, took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to raise alarm over a national “collective anxiety” that he said spilled over this month into a spate of high-profile and seemingly senseless shootings.

Murphy’s comments came a day after police in Austin, Texas arrested a man who they said had fired on a pair of cheerleaders, after one of them mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car on the way home from practice. The shooting left one of the women critically injured, according to local officials.

Earlier in the week, a 20-year-old woman in upstate New York was killed when a man began shooting at a car that had mistakenly turned down his driveway, police said. Meanwhile in Kansas City, police have charged an 84-year-old white man with assault after he allegedly shot twice at Black teenager who had knocked on the wrong door last Thursday night. 

The teen, Ralph Yarl, was shot in the head and in the arm, but is recovering at home following his release from the hospital.

“Minor slights and indiscretions, small arguments, even simple wrong turns are becoming potentially deadly,” Murphy said. “We are becoming a heavily armed nation so fearful and angry, and so hair-trigger anxious that gun murders are just the ways in which we take out our frustrations.”

Murphy, one of the Senate’s most prominent voices in support of gun control, said that easy access to firearms, along with feelings of hate and anger, were part of a “toxic mixture” contributing to the recent violence making headlines.

However, he also asserted that his speech on the Senate floor was not an attempt to re-litigate the issue of guns, but rather to start an “apolitical discussion on the level of fear and hatred in society today.”

In recent weeks, Murphy has spoken frequently about the topic of loneliness and alienation — both of which he sees permeating society, particularly younger Americans.

Murphy has attributed some of the rise in those sentiments to technology and the Internet. In an interview with CT Insider earlier this month, he said “I see the dark corners of social media that can breed envy and resentment and self hate.”

On Wednesday Murphy called on Congress to take action against the amplification of extreme and divisive figures, including through increased regulation on social media companies.

The Democratic senator, who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security, has yet to lay out the specific details of legislation to combat what he says is the growing threat of isolation and anxiety in America. 

Murphy told CT Insider earlier this month that he and other lawmakers are still learning and getting briefings from tech industry leaders, and that he hopes to introduce bipartisan legislation around the regulation of social media later this year.