Hire More Heroes Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, over the course of the summer we have watched with horror as thousands more have died in Syria and Iraq, and the debate over what we should do about it has been omnipresent here in the Senate and in the House. We have held hearings, appeared on television to tell our story of how we should respond, and talked about it on the floor of the Senate and the House. Similarly, we have watched the conflict continue to persist in eastern Ukraine. Although they have not had the same number of casualties as we have seen in Syria and Iraq, they have had similar death and destruction, and we have responded with a vigorous debate on the floor of the Senate--again, hearings in committees, letters to the President, bipartisan pieces of legislation that have been proposed--about how the United States should seek to reduce the amount of casualties in a place like eastern Ukraine, and we are also debating what our response should be in Syria and Iraq.
What if I told you that this summer 4,000 people died in another conflict in which there was absolutely no debate here in the Congress? What if I told you there were 4,000 people who died this summer in a conflict and not a single committee in the Congress held a hearing on it? What if I told you there was a conflict this summer in which 4,000 people perished and not a single Member of the majority party in the House or the Senate has proposed any comprehensive way to deal with it?
This chart shows the number of people on a daily, monthly, and annual basis who are killed by guns. On average, it is 86 a day, 26,000 a month, and 31,000 a year. This summer, while kids were out of school, over 4,000 people--just this summer--died across this country from gun violence. I come to the floor not as often as I would like but as often as I can to tell some of their stories because I kind of thought these numbers would be enough to persuade Members of this body to do something--anything--to try to stem the scourge of gun violence in this body, but it hasn't, and so my hope is maybe by telling the stories of some of these individuals, it will hopefully make a difference. Every day we add dozens of stories of young men and women--mostly young men and women--whose lives were cut short, whose greatness we were never able to see, whose potential was never realized because they were killed by a gun.
This summer we have been gripped by mass shooting after mass shooting.
Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons, and DePayne Doctor, and Clementa Pinckney--we don't know all of those names, but we know about many of them because they were killed at a mass shooting in a church in South Carolina.
Sgt Carson Holmquist, PO2 Randall Smith, GySgt Thomas Sullivan, LCpl ``Skip'' Wells, and SSgt David Wyatt--maybe you have heard their names because they were all killed at a shooting in Tennessee at a Chattanooga Armed Forces recruiting center.
Maybe you have heard of Jillian Johnson and Mayci Breaux, who were killed in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA, in July of this year.
Most people have now heard of Allison Parker and Adam Ward, who were gunned down on live TV just a few weeks ago in Virginia.
On each one of those days--June 17, a shooting in South Carolina; July 16, a shooting in Tennessee; July 24, a shooting in Louisiana; and August 26, a shooting in Virginia--there were dozens more people who died from gunshot wounds whom we never heard of, but they meant something to their families. To this day their loss is experienced deeply by those who knew them well.
Some of them were people who were close to those of us who serve in public service. Matthew Shlonsky was killed this summer in Washington, DC. On August 15 he was heading to a going-away party, and he had just stepped out of a cab when he was shot outside of the Shaw-Howard Metro station. He was the sixth gunshot victim in the Shaw area in a little over a week.
Think about what it is like to live in a neighborhood in which there have been six shootings over the course of a week. Think of the fear that breeds in those communities.
We knew Matthew because he was an intern for one of our colleagues. He was working as a consultant at Deloitte, but he had served as a Senate intern. He was an amazing kid by all accounts. He traveled the world, spoke two languages, and was a star hockey player. His future was absolutely limitless. But because this city is awash in guns--many of them illegal, many of them in the hands of criminals who get them because of giant, gaping holes in our background check system--Matthew Shlonsky is no longer with us. He is dead at the age of 23.
How about the heartbreaking story of Carey Gabay, who was 43 years old. He was serving as an assistant counsel to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and before that he had been counsel of the Empire State Development Corporation. He died on September 16--just on the back end of the summer--after he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in New York City. He was an innocent bystander when he was shot in the head while attending the pre-West Indian American Day Parade festival with friends and family.
He was the son of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in public housing in the Bronx. He had done amazingly well. He attended Harvard University and Harvard Law School. He was working for the Governor and trying to make a better life for others by trying to give opportunities to kids who grow up in the same circumstance as he did. A friend described him as ``an amazing human being who melded public service, professionalism, personal integrity with warmth and caring for everyone he knew.'' He was 43 years old when he was gunned down in broad daylight outside of a festival simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This summer 4,000 people were killed by guns, and not a single public hearing has occurred in the U.S. Senate to discuss a solution. There is not even mention of a debate happening anytime soon on the floor of the Senate as to how we stop these episodes of mass slaughter. We are averaging more than one mass shooting in this country every single day this year. That is astounding. That is shocking. Yet there is total, utter, absolute silence from the world's greatest deliberative body on what we should do about it.
I am the last person to say there is any panacea coming from the Congress on how to stem gun violence. We are never going to be able to eliminate these epidemic rates of gun violence just by one law or set of laws that are passed. But what is an absolute indictment of this place is that we don't even try.
I have made this contention on the floor before, and I will make it again. I truly believe our silence on this has become complicity. We have become accomplices to these murders because by saying and doing nothing, we offer up a kind of quiet endorsement to people who exist in the fringes of their minds and who are thinking about contemplating violence, and the leaders of this country are doing absolutely nothing to seriously condemn or stop their destructive, malevolent behavior. Our silence has become complicit.
I hope that at some point over the course of the rest of this year, we can begin a conversation as to how we can turn these numbers back in the right direction. There is no other country in the industrialized world that even comes close to these numbers.
I can offer a suggestion on where to start. If between now and December we can't come to a common understanding on our gun laws--I still don't understand why we can't just do that since 90 percent of Americans support expansive background checks--let's start by fixing the mental health care system.
I think there are a lot of reasons why Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 kids over 2 years ago. The child advocate in Connecticut issued a damning report on his interactions with the mental health care system. His mother tried and tried and tried, but in the end she gave up and let him retreat into the isolation of his room, where he plotted these murders. That family and mother and young man ran into barrier after barrier and obstacle after obstacle trying to find a course of treatment for his very serious set of illnesses.
What we know is that people with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of gun violence than the perpetrators of it. There is no inherent connection between being mentally ill and being violent. There is no greater incidence of mental illness in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Yet we have epidemic rates of gun violence. But I will certainly be the first to admit that if we fix our mental health care system, it will help lots of people who have no intersections with gun violence, and it will push these numbers downward because some of these people are committing these murders because they are not getting treatment for serious illnesses.
Senator Cassidy and I--frankly, we don't agree on a lot because he is a conservative Republican from the Deep South, and I am a progressive Democrat from the Northeast--introduced a mental health reform measure which has broad bipartisan support and which would seek to break down these barriers in order to get care for the seriously mentally ill and try to get the parents more involved in the care, especially of young adults. It would increase the capacity in our mental health treatment system for both outpatient and inpatient care. Maybe over the course of the rest of this year, at the very least we can make a dent in the massive shortfalls in our behavioral health care system.
The families I have become so close with in Sandy Hook, CT, commanded me to come down to the floor every week or so and tell these stories, the voices of victims. They would like us to come together on a set of meaningful changes to our gun laws. They just don't understand why Adam Lanza was able to walk into the school with a gun that killed 20 little boys and girls in less than 5 minutes because of how powerful it was with the 30-round cartridges he was able to use. They don't want our inability to get action on gun laws to stop us from making other progress that would make the next Adam Lanza less likely. Maybe we can do that. But we should do something.
Our silence is an embarrassment after this summer of mass shootings. These news reports should command us to action, but we, frankly, shouldn't have had to wait for the news reports of shootings in Virginia or Louisiana or South Carolina because these numbers were just as true last year as they are this year. Maybe there are more episodes of mass violence and mass shootings and headline-grabbing atrocities, but these numbers which reflect what is happening on the ground in New Haven, CT; Hartford, CT; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; and Los Angeles have been a reality for a long time, and we should have woken up long ago. But maybe over the course of this year we can make some progress so that moving forward there are a few less voices of victims to bring to the floor of the Senate.
I thank the Presiding Officer.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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