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Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, a few days ago, I was with one of the parents from Sandy Hook Elementary School who lost her son 11 years ago today. She talked about this being the time of the year where she starts to spiral.
Today is a day when we are thinking about all of those parents, about all of those brothers and sisters who, this morning, had to relive the morning that they went through 11 years ago, December 14, 2012, when 20 sets of parents kissed their first graders goodbye as they dropped them off for school and never ever saw them again.
It is a fate that none of us would ever wish on another human being. For those of us who have never experienced the death of a child, there is no way for us to understand what those parents and what those families are going through.
One mother of a child who was lost in Sandy Hook had a tactic that she would use in those early days. She would pretend that her son was just at a friend's house on a playdate to convince herself, as best she could, that he wasn't dead, that he was just visiting a friend around the corner. It was the only way that she could clean up the house, get through her daily work. But then, all of a sudden, it would come flooding back to her that he wasn't at a friend's house; he wasn't around the corner; he was never, ever coming home. The things you have to do on a daily basis to try to process the loss of a child, they are unfathomable to most of us.
I have kind of run out of things to say about these amazing kids and these amazing adults--the adults who protected them that day, the children who would be turning 18 this year.
In Connecticut, we wear our hearts really heavy, but we also get to celebrate all of the things that have happened because so many of these families took their grief and they turned it into action and they turned it into change. So many of these families have started not-for- profit organizations and started charities to try to change other people's lives. Many of these families have been deeply engaged in the work of trying to make sure that mass shootings never happen again.
There has been a lot of joy and many miracles that have resulted from this awful tragedy. It does not square the moral order of the universe, but it is important to pay tribute to the way in which so many members of the Sandy Hook and Newtown community, as well as so many families who are directly affected by this shooting, have been able to manage through the grief and perform miracles at the same time.
We just need to make a decision as a country as to whether we want to live in a world in which this carnage continues.
This isn't an accident. It isn't bad luck. It is just a choice. It is just a choice we have made to put our kids in jeopardy every single day that they go to school--for kids who live in my neighborhood, in the south end of Hartford, put them in jeopardy every day when they walk to and from school. It is a choice that we make, and we could make a different choice.
So today is a day for me that I think about all of my friends in Sandy Hook, that I think back on that day, being there at the firehouse that was serving as the emergency response hub, being outside the room as parents were told that their children were lying dead on the floor of their elementary school.
But it is also a day in which I remember that we are not helpless. This is also a day in which I recommit myself to the notion that I, as a Member of the U.S. Senate, have something to contribute to the work necessary to make sure that kids never ever, ever face this fate again.
Today, on the 11th anniversary, I have a little bit more hope than I had on the 10th or the 9th or the 8th or the 7th or the 6th or the 5th or the 4th or the 2nd or the 1st anniversary.
Why? Because last year, Republicans and Democrats came together in this Senate in the wake of another mass school shooting, tragically reminiscent of Sandy Hook--the shooting in Uvalde, TX--and we acted. We put aside our political differences. We passed the first serious gun safety measure in 30 years. Even though forces outside of this building opposed it, we decided to come together because we thought we had an obligation to make this country safer, to try to make it a little bit less likely that a parent has to wake up on a morning of the anniversary of their child's death and try to figure out how to survive it. And why, this year, I feel more hopeful and more confident is because we now have data, we now have results in the wake of the passage of last year's legislation.
Right now, as we speak, we are tracking for there to be a 12-percent reduction in gun murders in this country from 2022 to 2023. That would be the biggest ever one-year reduction in gun murders in our lifetime.
What does that mean? It means that 8 or 10 fewer people are dying every day from gun violence. What does that mean? It means that 110, rather than 120, people are dying of gun violence. That is not an acceptable result, but it is proof of concept that when we change the laws to honor the death of so many innocents, we prevent the death of innocents in the future.
So today is a day when I relive that moment 11 years ago today. It is a day when I reach out to my friends in Sandy Hook to tell them how much of my heart is with them. But this year, on the 11th anniversary, it is a day in which I have confidence that if we continue to do the hard work of changing our gun laws to make it harder for dangerous people to have weapons and harder for anybody to have the most dangerous weapons--the kind of weapons that were used to kill these kids and teachers--that we can save lives.
In 1 year, we have seen the biggest drop in gun murders in our lifetime. It is a result of legislation that we passed, and it is a signal to us of what we can achieve in the future.
I thank my colleagues for what we did last year. I thank my colleagues for making it possible to show the families in Newtown and the victims of gun violence all across this country what is possible. And on the 11-year mark of that tragedy in Sandy Hook, I compel my friends in the Senate to do more.
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