They remind us that this is a moment and a movement of conviction, of
compassion, and of courage.
  The decision 4 years ago today was the result of millions of
Americans working, standing, speaking, marching, organizing, and
praying. That is why, a year ago, I introduced a resolution to
designate June as ``Life Month,'' so that each year we can recommit to
celebrating and defending the preciousness of life.
  Today, I call upon my colleagues in the Senate to help pass this
resolution so that we can be reminded every June of the importance of
the fight for life, that we can recommit to the American ideal that
every single life has dignity, and that we can stand together as a
nation that chooses life.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.

                    Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor with good news. It is
really important news, but it is news that not a lot of people in this
country know about. We are experiencing, over the last 3 years, a
dramatic decline in the number of people who are killed by guns. Gun
violence rates in this country are plummeting, and they have been
plummeting since 2002.
  Let me just give you a couple of numbers. From 2023 to 2024--the last
year that we have full numbers for--we saw urban gun homicides drop by
16.7 percent. That is extraordinary. And, in general, urban homicides
have been dropping by double-digit percentages over the last 3 years.
  Mass shootings are way down. That might actually make sense to you
because, while we still hear about these awful mass shootings on the
news, we have a sense that they are not appearing on our television
screens with the rapidity and frequency they were a few years ago.
  Now, in 2025, there were 400 mass shootings in America. That is
unacceptable. There are still more mass shootings than days in the
year, but that is a 41-percent decline from 2021.
  Similarly, school shootings have declined over the last 2 years.
  This is all good news. There are more people alive today because
something is changing in America. And while it is still unacceptable
that we are averaging a mass shooting every day in this country, the
numbers are unquestionably heading in the right direction.
  Now, there are a set of complicated factors to explain why that is
happening, but it is not coincidental to the passage in 2022 of the
most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in 30 years.
And that is why I am on the floor today, because tomorrow will mark 4
years since this Senate passed and got signed into law the Bipartisan
Safer Communities Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that
strengthened the gun laws of this country while respecting the
constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to be able to purchase and
own weapons.
  Let me just remind you of what that bill did, because it is important
to remember that we can come together.
  There were, I think, 15 Republican Senators that supported this
legislation. It received Republican votes in the House of
Representatives as well.
  This legislation said: Listen, we have got to be a little bit more
careful before we sell an assault weapon to a 19-year-old or a 20-year-
old--because we had seen, over and over again, that it tended to be,
unfortunately, young men under the age of 21 who were carrying out
these mass murders.
  And so while legislation didn't take away the ability of someone
under 21 to buy a weapon--because this is what we needed in order to
get bipartisan consensus--we did put enhanced background checks for
those individuals--just an extra check, most significantly, with the
local police department to see if this was somebody that the police
knew as being troubled. Well, since passage of the bill, 800 firearms
purchases have been prevented solely because of these enhanced checks.

  These were mainly purchasers that were prohibited from buying a
weapon, but until you called the local police department, you didn't
find out that they were actually prohibited. But sometimes it was that
this was an individual that was in crisis. The local police department
knew it, and the enhanced check caught them.
  The second thing the bill did was just make firearms trafficking a
Federal crime. It was crazy that it hadn't been. It made trafficking
and straw purchasing a Federal crime. And since that bill went into
effect, there have been 280 cases with 525 defendants who have been
brought under Federal charges for gun trafficking. That is a big part
of why there is so much urban gun homicide--because there is a pipeline
of illegal guns that goes into places like Hartford, CT; New Haven, CT;
or Chicago, IL. Now we have interrupted that pipeline of illegal guns.
  What is something else that that bill did? It said that if you have a
history of domestic violence, you can't buy a weapon, regardless of
whether that violence is against your wife or your girlfriend. There
used to be something called the boyfriend loophole. If you had
committed domestic violence against your girlfriend, you could still
purchase and have weapons. Well, we closed that loophole on a
bipartisan basis. And since that law passed, there have been 10,000
firearms purchases that have been denied because the individual had a
history of domestic violence.
  Now, the way that we got that bill passed, with Republican votes, was
to give the ability of that individual to reapply for the ability to
buy firearms. We didn't take that right away permanently. Some of us
might have wanted that prohibition to be permanent after you have a
domestic violence conviction on your record, but that is how we got the
bill passed--an example of how we can find common ground.
  And then the last thing I want to mention is that the bill put about
$1.4 billion into funding existing and new community anti-gun violence
measures--and this is maybe the secret sauce. This is maybe the biggest
explanation as to why numbers are going down.
  What we find in community after community that is plagued with high
rates of gun violence is that it is normally a very small group of
people--again, largely young men--that are committing these acts of
violence and that if you engage in targeted interventions aimed at
these small groups of young men, you can very quickly get gun violence
rates down, and it doesn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars,
especially in a small community like Hartford.
  Hartford has a number of really impactful but small organizations
that do this community anti-gun violence work. We gave them a small
amount of money from this legislation, and they have made a big, big
difference in Hartford. These are groups like Hartford Communities That
Care, Compass.
  Hartford had 37 murders in 2022, the year that we passed this bill.
In 2025, Hartford had 10 murders. That is an extraordinary decline, 37
to 10.
  In 2020, there were 223 shootings, a reminder most people don't die
in shootings. They get badly wounded. Their lives are altered by the
shooting even though they don't die.
  Mr. President, 223 shootings in Hartford in 2020--89 last year. That
is a 25-year low. And all the laws we passed made a difference in
Connecticut, but Connecticut already had pretty strict gun laws so a
lot of the stuff we passed didn't have a big impact on Connecticut, but
the community anti-gun violence money did because those groups are now
well-funded.
  Again, these aren't groups with $10 million-a-year budgets. These are
often very small organizations that have four or five people on staff.
For instance, one of the things that these groups often do is when
there is a shooting, they rush to the emergency room because there are
often cycles of retributive violence that play out: Somebody gets shot.
Their group of friends congregate at the emergency room. They make a
plan to engage in retributive violence. Well, these community workers
can often get to the emergency room and interrupt that cycle of
violence, and they have been enormously successful.
  Now, there are threats to the progress we have made. I don't want to
make this a speech about President Trump, but it is just true that he
has stopped funding the programs that support community anti-gun
violence initiatives.
  There are also billions of dollars in that bill that we passed for
school-based mental health, and he has also suspended many of those
accounts. That is bad news.
  He has also issued new regulations that undermine other parts of the
bill,