Pregnancy Centers

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, this week is National Gun Violence Survivors Week.

I wanted to come down to the floor today to share with my colleagues the meaning and the impact of this week and the meaning and the impact of a national network of gun violence survivors on the debate to change the Nation's gun laws.

I also wanted to share with my colleagues some good news about what has happened over the course of the last year since the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. That is the first significant change in our Nation's gun laws in 30 years.

I want to start by talking about survivors. I want to start by talking about two people whom I have referenced on the floor of the Senate in prior speeches, two of my great friends in Hartford, CT--Sam Saylor and Janet Rice. Sam and Janet shared a son, Shane. Shane was a pretty incredible young man, not without challenges, but he had risen up and met those challenges over the course of his life.

On October 20 of 2012--just a month before the shooting at Sandy Hook--he became the 20th victim of gun violence in Hartford that year in a typically random act of violence. He was fixing up cars and selling them for a small profit.

He was transferring one of those cars to an acquaintance. His girlfriend was with him. Some coarse words were exchanged between the two parties about his girlfriend. A physical altercation broke out, which caused Luis Rodriguez to go to his car where he had a gun--an illegal gun. He took it out, and he shot Shane Oliver, essentially after an exchange of words about Shane's girlfriend. Shane collapsed to the floor. When he reached the hospital, he was dead--20 years old with his whole life ahead of him. He left behind a network of survivors--his parents--but also a daughter, Se'Cret.

Both Sam and Janet went into the work of preventing gun violence. They joined advocates in Hartford to try to create a reality in which that kind of random death--that kind of random gun violence--wouldn't be a reality any longer in Hartford, and they devoted themselves to that work. Janet joined an organization that responded to shootings to try to interrupt the cycles of violence that often happened in Hartford. So she has spent much of the last several years responding-- on a nightly basis often--to episodes of violence and to shootings.

In April of last year, she got a phone call to respond to a shooting that had happened. She got in her car, and she headed for that scene. As she was driving there, she got a second call from her supervisor, who told her to pull over.

He said: Janet, you can't be driving when you hear this news. The young woman who was shot, who you are going to respond to, is your granddaughter--Shane's daughter.

Se'Cret died that night. A couple of days later, I went to her funeral.

That is what is going on out there in the world today, right? For Sam and Janet, they lost Shane, and then a decade later, they lost Shane's daughter. I wish that their story was the anomaly, but it is not. There are thousands of families in this country who have lost multiple loved ones--brothers and sisters, daughters and granddaughters--to this epidemic of gun violence.

So, in this week in which we commemorate the survivors, it is important to understand the depth of this tragedy; but it is also important to celebrate the work that these survivors have done, because over the past 10 years, in particular, through a number of organizations in this country, survivors like Sam and Janet and many others have come together to demand that Congress and State legislators and mayors and city councils do something to stop this reality in which parents and grandparents have to lose sons and granddaughters to gun violence.

Last year, we finally stepped up to the plate and did something, in part because of the advocacy of all of those survivors. We passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Our theory was that, if we make a big change in the Nation's gun laws to make it a little bit harder for dangerous people to get their hands on dangerous weapons, well, then, we can try to make a dent in the epidemic levels of gun homicide in this country.

Now, I have said all of this while standing next to this chart so you know of the success story that I am about to tell you. Last year, urban homicides in this Nation fell by 12.1 percent. That is the biggest 1- year reduction in urban homicides in the history of the United States of America.

Now, is that a cause for celebration? No, because there are still far too many people in this country who are dying at the hands of gun violence, but we should appreciate the fact that a 1-year 12-percent reduction in urban homicides is proof that, when you change the laws of the country, our communities get safer.

So I want to talk to you, just for a moment, about what happened over the past year. Urban homicides fell by 12 percent. Gun-related injuries and deaths all across the country have fallen by 10 percent--again, just an absolutely remarkable 1-year reduction: a 10-percent reduction in gun injuries and gun deaths in a 1-year period of time. The reason that this is happening is, in part, because we have changed the law.

One of the things that happened over the course of this last year is we have started to get a lot more careful about selling guns to young buyers. So we have had a number of young buyers in this country who have been disqualified from buying an assault weapon. Often, those young buyers are in crisis, and by stopping hundreds of young people from buying assault weapons--because we found out through the provisions of this bill that they were in crisis--we have likely interrupted many mass shootings.

Second, we have a lot more prosecutions of gun traffickers because we made gun trafficking a Federal crime. So hundreds of prosecutions have been successfully completed over the last year against gun trafficking rings. That means there are less guns in our city that are being trafficked on the black market.

We have more red flag laws in this country and stronger red flag laws, in part because we put money into the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to encourage States to adopt and strengthen their red flag laws. These are the laws that take guns away temporarily from people who are in crisis or who are making threats against other community members. Those red flag laws have become more important.

We have put out the door $438 million for community anti-gun violence work, like the work that Janet Rice and Sam Saylor do. So there are dozens of anti-gun violence organizations in our cities that are receiving money to help them interrupt violence.

We have sent billions of dollars out the door for additional mental health services, particularly targeted at young people, who are often the primary victims and the primary perpetrators of gun crime in this country.

I can't tell you that this 12 percent reduction in urban homicides is completely due to the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. I can't tell you that. But what I know is that if you look at the trajectory of violence in this country over time, the biggest drops have always happened right after Congress does a better job of regulating firearms. The two biggest drops in violence in this country's history are right after the 1930s gun control act and right after the 1990s Brady bill and assault weapons ban.

Whether this trend continues, I don't know, but if it does or even if we get a 6-percent reduction next year and an 8-percent reduction the next year, this could represent the third giant reduction in violence rates in this country's history. If that is the trajectory, then a piece of that story is the bipartisan legislation we passed.

As we commemorate Gun Violence Survivors Week, it is important to remember that when you lose a loved one, especially in that sudden violent way, to gun violence, there is no repair; there is no recovery; your life never returns to normal.

After Janet lost Shane, she didn't leave her house for months, wouldn't leave her house for months. When she finally did start leaving her house, often she would do it in this manner: Often late at night, when the streets of Hartford were quiet, she would get in her car, and she would drive from her home to the site that Shane was shot. She actually got to see Shane alive after he was shot; she held him in her arms as he bled out. She would go to that site, which is just two blocks away from where I live today in Hartford, and she would turn on her high beams, and she would wait.

When she told me the story, I asked her: What are you waiting for? What were you waiting for?

She said: I was waiting for Shane to come back.

She would go to the site where he was shot, where he bled to death in her arms, and she would turn on her high beams in hopes that maybe Shane would come back.

That just gives you one single window into what life is like for a mother when she loses a son or a daughter to gun violence.

Survivors of gun violence--those who have lived through a shooting or those who have lost loved ones in a shooting--their lives are changed forever. This week, we pay tribute to them by recognizing the work they have done to rattle the conscience of this country, to change the gun laws of this country in a historic way, leading to the largest ever 1- year drop in urban homicides in this country's history.

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