WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) released the following statement on Sunday following the recent shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio: 

“Nowhere but in the United States does this epidemic rate of mass murder occur. My heart goes out to all the victims of gun violence this weekend - in El Paso and Dayton, but also Baton Rouge, Colorado Springs, and New York. What is so heartbreaking is that almost all of this carnage is preventable. Good laws stop bad people from doing horrible things. But many of my colleagues in Congress think that their jobs require them only to express words of sympathy and concern,” said Murphy. 

Murphy continued, “Why run for Congress if you aren't prepared to pass laws that make people safer? Why go through all the trouble of being elected to federal office if you throw your hands up and let evil win? These shooters, contemplating mass slaughter, take note of their government's inaction, and they infer this silence as endorsement. For every national leader who wakes up Monday, and decides to do nothing – again – just know that the blood is soaking deeper into your hands. Maybe we cannot fix the entire gun violence epidemic – which took dozens of other lives this weekend, in homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings – overnight, but why don't we at least try to start. Why sign up for public office if you aren't going to at least try?” 

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