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WASHINGTON – On the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) called on the Senate to keep guns out of the hands of criminals by passing commonsense gun violence prevention reforms. Murphy argued that Congress’ failure to address the scourge of gun violence across America is “complicity”. 

Highlights from Senator Murphy’s remarks are below:

“This silence from Congress has become complicity. I know that sounds like a really hard thing to say. That sounds very hyperbolic, but let me walk you through why I’ve come to believe that [Congress’] failure to act in the wake of these mass shootings has made us complicit in them.

“I think these young men – and it's not all young men, but it’s mostly young men – whose minds are becoming unhinged and are contemplating mass violence, they take cues from the total, complete, absolute silence from Congress in the face of mass shooting after mass shooting. If the nation's top elected leaders, the people charged with deciding what matters in this nation, don't even try to stop the mass carnage, then these would-be shooters reasonably conclude that we must be okay with it. Because if a society doesn't condone settling a grievance with a gun, wouldn't the people in charge of it at least try to stop it?

“But we don't try, and that's what's most offensive. That's what truly turns my stomach. We just lived through a summer in which 4,000 people died on the streets of this nation, and this body is sending a loud, clear signal that we don't care. We don't care. Nine people – nine more people died on Friday, another mass slaughter – and we're back to normal this week. We're going to debate the Toxic Substances Control Act this week. And I don't deny that that's probably a very important piece of legislation, but we're acting as if there isn't an epidemic of preventable murder happening in this nation and that it's getting worse.

“Somebody wrote last week that the gun control debate ended the day after Sandy Hook because that was the day that America decided that it was okay to murder 20 first-graders. I know that's not the message that my colleagues are intending to send, and we appreciate all of the sincere notes of sympathy that have been sent over the course of the last two years, three years, to Newtown, and those that went out on Friday to Oregon. But words are beginning to become meaningless. The tweets really aren't helping. I'd argue that they're just becoming a cover for cowardice.

“It's not a coincidence that America has a gun violence rate that is 20 times that of any other competitor nation. We are doing something wrong here. And the whole reason we draw our paychecks is to make wrong things right. If we can't do something – something: a background checks law, mental health bill, more resources for law enforcement – if we can't do anything to try to stop this soul-crushing, life-extinguishing violence, then we might as well just go home.”