Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. That is right.

Mr. MURPHY. No one in Connecticut thought this was taking their rights away, and as the Senator from West Virginia knows, we have a strict background check system in Connecticut already, so in Connecticut we had already subjected these sales to the background check system. My impression is that our hunters, sports shooters, and collectors have never felt that they were on the precipice of losing their right to enjoy their sport or their pastime, or to be able to build on their collection. As you mentioned, there are definitely disputes when you get into the area of banning this kind of weapon or that kind of weapon, but that has nothing to do with this bill. This bill is just about saying that if you are a criminal, you can't buy a weapon. There may be other things that are controversial, but this one is noncontroversial. The Senator has told me it is not controversial in West Virginia either, when laid out as to what it really is. I yield for a question.

Mr. MURPHY. I say to Senator Heinrich, it is hard to understand why we wouldn't do that, especially when, as you noted, people on that list go in and buy a gun and they are almost universally successful in walking away with that weapon. It doesn't happen very often; let's be realistic about what the numbers are. I think I read them earlier and from 2004 to 2014 there were 2,233 instances where suspected terrorists attempted to purchase a gun. And as my colleague mentioned, in 91 percent of those instances they were successful. So we are only talking about 200 or so instances a year. Now, of course, those are the only ones we know about because those are the ones that actually went through a background check. We don't actually know about all those people on the no-fly list who tried to buy a weapon successfully online or at a gun show. We know about these that rated about 200 a year. The reality is that terrorists today who are trying to perpetrate attacks on American citizens have lately not been using a bomb or an explosive device to carry out that attack. They have been using weapons--in the latest attack, an assault weapon. So we should just wake up to the weapon of choice of terrorist attackers and adopt this commonsense measure. I yield for a question.

Mr. MURPHY. I guess, I say to Senator Heinrich, if I had the 100- percent correct answer to that question, we probably wouldn't be here because we would probably have figured out how to solve it. It is such a unique issue in the American public sphere today, where 90 percent of the American public wants something to happen and this body will not do it. It is only controversial in the U.S. Congress. It is not controversial in people's living rooms. It is, frankly, not controversial in gun clubs. When you sit in a gun club and talk about whether a person who has been suspected of being a terrorist should be able to buy a gun, there is a consensus there too. We have talked about the cornucopia of reasons this doesn't happen, and it is part a story of the influence of the gun lobby; it is part a misinterpretation of the nature of the Second Amendment; it is part a belief that more guns make people safer, which the data does not show; it is part an answer in how voters prioritize the things they care about--that the 10 percent that doesn't agree is calling in to Members' offices at a level the 90 percent aren't; and, lastly, in part, it is an indictment of us. It is an indictment of those of us who have just let business as usual run on this floor, mass shooting after mass shooting. The reason we have chosen to do something exceptional--which is to hold up work on the CJS appropriations bill until we get an agreement to move forward on these two issues--is that we have something to answer for here as well. Maybe we haven't fought as hard as we should in order to get this done. And this may not get us there. We still need votes from Republicans. We can call for a vote, but we ultimately need them to vote yes on that. But at least we are showing the American public that we care as deeply as we should about ending this slaughter. I would be happy to yield for a question.

Mr. MURPHY. First of all, let me say that it doesn't surprise me because we know the level of carnage that entered that emergency room. But I think it should pain everyone to look at that pair of shoes, look at the blood splattered on them, think of the amount of blood that was lost by those who died and lived, and to think that we are not going to do anything about it. I yield for an additional question. I know the Senator from New York is waiting as well.

Mr. MURPHY. I yield to the Senator from New York for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Well, it is not surprising to me, would be my answer. I think, as the Senator knows, the marketing techniques of the companies that sell these guns are very disturbing. They often are marketing these guns in a way that would suggest that the intended use by the manufacturer is, in fact, to kill as many people as possible. They advertise the fact that you can conceal them easily, so they don't shy away from the fact that the collapsible elements make them easily concealable. The manufacturers are not suggesting that they should be used for mass slaughter, but they certainly are selling them in a way that speaks to an audience who is contemplating what they were contemplating. I yield to the Senator for an additional question.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator for his lifelong leadership on this question. I feel as though I am in a caucus of giants here, where people are coming down to the floor--from Senator Durbin to Senator Schumer, to Senator Blumenthal--who have all been working on this issue about firearms, trying to protect Americans from gun violence far longer than I have. Of course, as one of the original authors of the bill, Senator Schumer knows better than anyone that had you known that you were building a bill that would only cover 60 percent of gun sales, you never would have designed it, nor probably voted for it, with the terms that exist today. What has happened is that over time gun sales have migrated to other places. What we are simply trying to do is to reinforce the existing intention of the law. We are not trying to change the law at all. For everybody who voted for that bill originally to make sure criminals were not able to buy guns, they did so because they believed they were going to cover the majority of sales that were done in a commercial atmosphere. Now commerce happens in gun shows and online, and we need for the system to migrate to it. The Senator is also right that protecting America from terrorist attacks is ineffective unless we do both--make sure people on the terrorist watch list can't buy guns and that the forums which that list reaches are both gun stores and gun shows but also Internet sales. Further, the Senator is right that this is the only place where this issue is controversial. This is the only place in which there is a 50- 50 argument over this question. You find any other forum in any other part of the country and it is 90-10 on this issue, which is why my friend from West Virginia has led on this because he knows that in all of our States, this is something that brings Republicans and Democrats and gun owners and nongun owners together. Maybe other things don't, but this issue does. I yield to the Senator from New York for a question.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator for continuing to focus us on why we are here. Frankly, we are not here just to talk; we are here to bring some resolution to this debate and to move on to consideration of the CJS appropriations bill. We are asking for two votes on what could be consensus measures with respect to protecting Americans. One, we want to make sure that if you are on the terrorist watch list, if you are on the no-fly list, then you cannot buy a gun. You are prohibited by law from buying a gun. There is no controversy about that in the American public. It would make a tremendous difference. Second, in order to make that provision truly effective, we need to make sure that no matter where you buy a gun--whether you buy it at a bricks-and-mortar store, online, or a gun show--you are subject to background checks. One of those provisions without the other doesn't protect us. Both of them together protect Americans from terrorist attacks, protect the flow of illegal guns into communities like Chicago without having any effect on individual Second Amendment rights. If you are a law-abiding citizen in this country, the two measures that we are proffering for a vote on the Senate floor will have zero impact on you. If we can get agreement to move forward in a consensus way on those two measures, my hope is that we could come together and find language that both sides could agree with. At the very least, we should have a vote on these measures so we could see where people stand. Then we would gladly relinquish the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, through the Chair, I thank my colleague for the question. From the layman's perspective, they don't seem like they are different weapons. They are both incredibly powerful weapons. They are both derivatives of weapons that were intended to kill as many people as quickly as possible.

Mr. MURPHY. And it was not. As we stated, this system worked for a very long time until all of these gun sales migrated out of the system. But we have plenty of examples in which we have passed sensible commonsense gun laws that didn't lead to all of the worst case scenarios that many people often proffer to us. I yield to Senator Manchin for another question.

Mr. MURPHY. I will.

Mr. MURPHY. I yield for an additional question.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New York, and through the Chair, I yield for a question from the Senator from Minnesota without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Senator Blumenthal, and I want to thank you for your work on the Judiciary Committee for leading this fight to try to make sure that law enforcement has what it needs to protect this country. Again, I spoke to this broader conversation about how you protect this country from domestic terrorist attacks. I think there are a lot of people who want to drill it down to only one silo of conversation. As I remarked at the beginning, some people want to make this just about the fight in the Middle East. Some people want to make this just about surveillance. Other people want to make this just about gun laws. It is not any of those things. It is about a combination of efforts. So we have to admit that this fight against ISIS and against Al Qaeda in the areas in which they have large amounts of control is an ongoing fight. That is not going to be concluded tomorrow or next week or the month after. We think we are making dramatic progress, but it is going to take us a while. As I remarked at the outset, it also means that there is an inverse proportionality between our success in taking the fight to Al Qaeda and ISIS inside theaters of war and their importance in attacking us here at home in the sense that they are going to need to take the fight to us here if they are having less success in repelling our efforts to push them back inside the Middle East. That is where law enforcement comes in, Senator Blumenthal, and you are exactly right. Let's make it a priority to defeat ISIS. But let's admit that for the time being, they are going to try to launch lone- wolf attacks here. What we know is they generally don't go through the trouble of trying to coordinate these attacks ahead of time. So it makes it much more difficult to stop. They are trying to find someone who is on the fringes of society, who may be mentally ill or prone to radicalization and weaponize them. Sometimes it makes it difficult for law enforcement to find that needle in a haystack. What we know is that in this case, they had found that needle in a haystack. They had found him twice. Perhaps his inclusion permanently on one of these lists wouldn't have done much good because it wouldn't have prevented him from getting a firearm. There wasn't as much due diligence done as should have been. This clearly is an important tool of law enforcement, and we need to give it to them. I hope--and I think Senator Mikulski talked about this in her opening comments--we can talk about giving broader resources to the FBI and to law enforcement to do the job they need do. We ask them to do more and more, but we don't give them the resources that are necessary. If we are going to give them additional responsibilities-- keeping a better monitored, consolidated database, having a process for individuals to grieve their inclusion on it--then we have to make sure they have the resources necessary. To the Senator from New Jersey, I yield for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for that question. That is why it is so important to link those two pieces together. If you really want to protect this country from terrorist attacks by a firearm--as I stated before, that is the weapon of choice for those who want to do harm to this country for political reasons--then you have to both make sure those individuals are on the list of those prohibited from buying weapons and you have to make sure when you go and buy a weapon you intersect with that list. This has been a long trend line, as both of my friends know. It used to be that almost everybody who bought a gun went into their local gun store to purchase that weapon, and over the course of time, for a variety of reasons, the means by which you bought a firearm has diversified significantly. We now have lots of sales occurring online, as we do with almost every other commercial good, and there is this buildout of gun shows, which are places where both licensed and nonlicensed dealers go to sell their guns in a very organized and controlled fashion. We have story upon story of individuals who have gone to buy guns in those gun stores in mass quantities, knowing that they would not have to go through a background check and then selling them on the black market. So someone who knows they are prohibited from buying a gun decides not to buy a gun in a gun store; instead, they go buy a number of weapons at a gun show, which is unregulated. Those individuals who are not licensed gun dealers are able to sell their weapons without background checks at a gun show, and they can get as many as they want. That is not a secret. I mean, you don't have to scratch the surface of America's gun law or debate this subject very hard to find out that there are easy ways to get guns without getting a background check. You can also go online. You can very easily buy a weapon on ARMSLIST without going through a background check. We cannot adequately protect this country from terrorist attacks by firearm unless you do both, and that is why those two are linked together. As the Senator also knows, let's not shy away from the fact that the reason we are on the floor today is that this slaughter also happens outside the realm of terrorist attacks. In fact, the majority-- 95-plus percent--of Americans who have been killed by guns were not killed in a terrorist attack, but many of them were killed by guns sold outside the background check system. This is a two for one. If there are objections on the Republican side to the provisions of the Manchin-Toomey legislation, I hope that over the course of this afternoon and this evening we can come together on those issues. If you pass some version of that legislation, which is supported by 90 percent of the American public and the vast majority of gun owners, in conjunction with putting terrorists or would-be terrorists or suspected terrorists on that same list, then you have not only protected our country from terrorist attacks, but you have also addressed this epidemic that we all live with on a regular basis, whether it be in Newark, Bridgeport, or, as Senator Durbin talked about, Chicago. The regularity of gun crime that is often associated with weapons that were purchased outside of the background check system is not an inevitability that we have to accept. We can do something about it by coming together today. I think that is what my friend is getting at by linking together two policies that have to be interdependent in order to protect ourselves from a terrorist attack, and it is also about this broader issue of taking on crimes in our city. I yield to the Senator from Connecticut for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator. It is a glaring loophole, and it is unclear why it has persisted. This idea of closing the loophole has been backed by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and I think the Senator talked about how this has been a bipartisan commitment. The George W. Bush Department of Justice supported the exact same bill that we are talking about today, in 2007. Attorney General Holder, in response to a question from Senator Feinstein at a 2009 Judiciary Committee hearing, said: I think that legislation was initially proposed by the Bush administration. It was well conceived, and we will continue to support that. Not so long ago, this was an issue that was conceived by a Republican administration. It didn't seem to become controversial until gun lobbying organizations decided that it should be. We should remember that about all the things we are discussing here, because we live in a world today in which we think the issue of gun laws is the third rail of American politics. But all of the legislation that we are talking about could not have passed if it wasn't for Republicans and Democrats coming together, whether it be to support the existing background check system or to support the existing ban on assault weapons--plenty of Republicans voted for that--or to conceive of this idea of terrorists being kept off the list. Here is how it plays out in real time. Elton Simpson is the name of the individual who opened fire on a Texas community center that was hosting an event displaying cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. I think we all agree that was an act of terrorism that was perhaps as a result of the radicalization of this individual. He was reportedly on the U.S. no-fly list. One of the Boston marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was reportedly placed on two terrorist watch lists in 2011. He committed that act with an explosive device, but he also killed a police officer with a handgun. Orlando is the latest example of crimes being committed by those who were in and around this database. The Senator from Nebraska asked the question earlier: How do we make sure that people aren't on there by mistake? Both parties will only support legislation that gives a practical means for individuals to grieve the fact that they are prohibited from buying a gun when indeed they should not be. I think at some level, we should accept that in virtually every Federal database that exists of people who are ineligible to buy a gun or people who are eligible to receive Medicare reimbursement, there are occasionally mistakes. But that does not stop us from trying to engage in collective action as a community to better protect our Nation. Let's get that list right. Let's give people the ability to get off it if they are on it wrongly. But let's accept that what we know is that in 90 percent of the cases over that 10-year period where people tried to buy a gun and were on the terrorist watch list, they were able to buy it. Let's be honest. This is only one element of what needs to be a broader strategy to combat either the potential radicalization leading to violence of American citizens or this broader question of combating gun violence at-large that Senator Durbin brought up. But it is an important glaring hole that needs to be corrected. I yield to my friend from Connecticut for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank my colleague. He is right. Charleston was almost a year ago to the day. But it is hard to keep track of when these year anniversaries occur because we are now having 1-year and 2-year and 3- year and 4-year anniversaries and major, epidemic mass shootings almost every month, and we are coming up on 4 years for Sandy Hook this December. I thank the Senator, and now I yield for a question to the Senator from Hawaii without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator from Oregon for his passion on both of these topics and for laying out the challenge for us, which is to move forward on these consensus proposals to close the terrorist loophole, to expand the number of sales that are subject to background checks, and to make sure everybody who buys a gun through a commercial sale has to prove they are not a criminal, but linking together what I would call doubling down on inclusiveness that has to happen in the wake of Orlando. An incident like this has a tendency to pull a community apart. Yet what we know is that the way to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again is for to us recommit ourselves to inclusiveness and to tolerance and to fighting discrimination. I can't say anything more than the Senator said with respect to that commitment as it applies to LGBT Americans. I do hope we are able to move the Equality Act through this body. I think we are in a long and frustratingly slow transition to a place that we all know we are going to get to, which is the full right to individuals no matter their sexual orientation. I also know that coming off this tragedy, there is going to be a tendency to marginalize another community, and that is the Muslim community in this country. As we talk about our efforts to build an inclusive society, we have to remember that the way in which we make our Nation safe is by building these inclusive communities where Muslim Americans feel a part of the whole, not feel excluded, because it builds and plays straight into the recruiting rhetoric of these terrorist groups if we are divided, if we push people out to the extremes. So I think this is a very important message for us all to hear, that fighting terrorism, whether it be hate-based crimes or politically based crimes inspired by terrorist groups--we combat it best, yes, when we tailor our gun laws to make sure that those who are thinking about these crimes, these horrific murderers, don't get guns, but also when we build these inclusive communities, which acts as a pretty strong prophylactic to terror. I yield to the Senator from Pennsylvania for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator. The Senator from Illinois, like Senator Blumenthal, has been a leader and a hero on this issue since before I got to the Senate, and he is exactly right. The state of this Nation is not just this repeated story line of mass shooting after mass shooting, it is the fact that even on days when there is not a mass shooting, there is the equivalent of a mass shooting happening in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, or New Orleans every single day. The numbers over Memorial Day weekend over Chicago are absolutely chilling. Think about living in a city in which, over the course of what should be a celebratory weekend, there are 60-some odd incidents of gunfire, and that is just gunfire that hits people. So it is critical we acknowledge that this epidemic that we are often focused on because of these mass shootings is an epidemic that exists every single day in this country. Senator Durbin is right that part of the reason we are asking that expanded background checks be part of this agreement that we come to over the course of today is because while we are on the bill that funds the Justice Department, while we are debating the bill that funds, in part, the background checks system, let's make sure it works. As the Senator knows, the data is clear: In jurisdictions that have near- universal background checks, there are less gun deaths--period, stop. In jurisdictions that decide they are going to apply background checks to as many sales as they can--let's be honest, you often can't get every sale, but you can certainly say, if you are selling guns online through advertisement or you are selling guns at a gun show that is organized and marketed, that those sales should be subject to a background check. In States that do that, they have lower rates of gun crimes. As the Senator knows so painfully--because Chicago sits right at the intersection of other jurisdictions--States can't do this by themselves. Even if a State decides to expand out the forums in which a gun sale is subject to a background check, if the other State next- door--let's say Indiana--has a lower standard, then your law is virtually meaningless. Of course, that is the story line in Chicago. The story line in Chicago is a handful of gun dealers--irresponsible gun dealers across the State line--selling guns to individuals who then take them into Chicago. This is certainly a debate brought on by another mass shooting, and we certainly have an obligation to make sure the terrorists don't obtain guns, but the Senator is right that this ultimately has to be an issue of doing something about our urban gun violence as well.

Mr. MURPHY. I yield to the Senator from Connecticut for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator for the question because of course this is a global fight against terrorism. This is not a battle that can be waged by one country and one country alone. The Senator is right that we are right now calling on our allies in Europe to take steps that would better protect all of us from these terrorist plotters. For instance, we have real concerns about the degree to which European nations are sharing data about potential terrorist plotters. Right now, law enforcement and terrorism surveillance in Europe is largely done on a country-by-country basis. Even within some countries, it is heavily siloed. In Brussels itself, I think by last count, there were six different police departments that didn't even communicate with each other. So there is a big problem in Europe about agencies not being able to talk to each other, and we are pressing Europe and Europeans to get more serious about both tracking terrorists throughout that continent and then sharing information with us. How is that relevant to the Senator's question? It is very hard for us to preach to the Europeans that they should get more serious about tracking terrorists if we have big holes in our databases as well, and we do today. From the information that is out there, we know that in Orlando, this individual was on a watch list. He came off of it. Because of the way in which the network of lists and notifications work today, the FBI was not notified when he went to buy a gun. We can have a debate as to whether he should have been prohibited from buying a gun if he was no longer on those lists, but it probably makes sense that the FBI should at least be notified so they can perhaps do some followup. As long as we have these gaps in our laws related to access to firearms for potential terrorists, then I think it is hard for us to tell the Europeans to do better. As the Senator knows, we also want to be able to connect what they know with what we know. There are American citizens who travel to other countries, and they may be radicalized in part in connection with those visits. We want to be able to get that information to the extent that a foreign country knows about the activities of American citizens when they travel abroad so that it is incorporated into our databases, incorporated into the list of people we are concerned about getting access to a weapon. I yield to the Senator from New Jersey for a question without losing my right to the floor. (Mr. SASSE assumed the Chair.)

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator for the question. I think it is a very dangerous message. I think it is the complete inability of this body to deal with important questions of the day. There is no doubt that we have disagreements. There is no doubt that there is a different approach on this side of the aisle than there is on the other side of the aisle. We have proffered the two policy proposals that are the easiest to find common ground on, but there is a host of other things that we would like on that we know will be much more difficult to get consensus on from the other side. What is so damaging about not doing anything and, frankly, what is so offensive about not even scheduling a debate is that we are admitting that this place doesn't have the capacity and the ability to deal with the big questions that are on people's minds. People are scared right now. They are scared, having watched what happened in Orlando and what happened in San Bernardino. You heard the letter or the voice mail that Senator McCaskill transcribed for us by a 14-year-old who didn't know whether she was going to be able to live out her dreams because she thought that gun violence was going to sweep over her community. It is so damaging to this country to leave people exposed to this potential terror, but it is also damaging to the reputation of this body, which is about as low as you can already get if we don't act. I yield for any other questions.

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator, and I thank her for the questions. I am thankful that my friend from New Mexico, Senator Heinrich, has joined us. I yield to him for a question without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. That is true. I thank the Senator for making that patently clear. What we are suggesting here is that the way we can come together in this body is around the simple premise that individuals with serious criminal records, individuals who have been deemed mentally incompetent or incapable, and people on the terrorist watch list shouldn't be able to buy firearms. That is it. That is what we are talking about here today and to build out that system in an effective way that is as foolproof as possible. That has nothing to do with the limitation on an individual's Second Amendment right. If someone wants to go buy a firearm, they are not a suspected terrorist, they do not have a serious criminal record, and they have not been judged or deemed by a judge to be mentally incapable of making their own decisions, then there is nothing in what we are proposing in this body to come together on that would restrict that. I yield to my friend, the Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Booker, for a question, without losing my right to the floor.