[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 65 (Wednesday, April 19, 2023)] [Senate] [Pages S1219-S1227] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Date: 2023-04-19
Chamber: SENATE
Mr. MURPHY: late on the night of November 2, 2012, Theodore Wafer was woken up by a loud sound. Somebody was knocking on his door--pounding on his door. He looked for his phone to call the police but couldn't find it. So, instead, he picked up his shotgun and went to the door. He saw on the other side a figure. He thought the person, maybe, was trying to break into his house, and so he fired a shotgun blast through the screen door to his porch. A couple of hours before that, Renisha McBride had gotten into a car accident not far away from Theodore Wafer's house. She was intoxicated. She was disoriented after the crash. She wandered around the neighborhood, late at night, looking for help. She couldn't find any, and she found herself knocking on the door of Mr. Wafer's home, looking for assistance. The shotgun blast hit her in the face, and she died. Jordan Davis was in Jacksonville, FL, a teenager out with his friends. They pulled into a gas station. As a lot of teenagers do, they were playing loud music. Michael Dunn was at the gas station as well. He didn't like the fact that the teenagers were playing their music too loud. He asked them to turn it down. There was an argument that took place. Michael Dunn said: I am not going to let anybody talk to me like that. And he pulled a handgun out of the glove compartment of his car, and he started shooting at Jordan Davis and his friends. Jordan Davis died as his friends sped away, trying to get away from the killing scene. Michael Dunn continued to shoot at the fleeing car. His girlfriend came out of the convenience store. She didn't know what had happened. Michael Dunn didn't tell her. They went to the hotel they were staying in, and they ordered a pizza. That happened 1 year before the death of Renisha McBride. This week, this country is convulsed by a series of horrific shootings where mistakes and minor slights are being met by gunfire. You know these stories by now. Ralph Yarl, 16 years old, went to go pick up his siblings, went to the wrong house, and Andrew Lester fired at him. Ralph Yarl is now clinging for life right now. Kaylin Gillis, 20 years old, and her friend pulled into the wrong driveway--just pulled into the wrong driveway--and Kevin Monahan fired his gun at them, killing Kaylin Gillis. And, just this morning, we are hearing news of another stunningly similar incident in Austin, TX, where a cheerleader, by accident, got into the wrong car after cheerleading practice and apparently that slight was so serious that the man in the car fired a gun at this cheerleader and her friend. One of those young women is critically injured. My friends, there is a toxic mixture in this country today of hate, of anger, and a population that is increasingly armed to the teeth with deadly weapons, many of them with no training, many of them with criminal records. This mixture is leading to our neighborhoods becoming a killing field. Minor slights and indiscretions, small arguments, even simple wrong turns are becoming potentially deadly. We are becoming a heavily armed nation, so fearful and angry and hair-trigger anxious that gun murders are now just the way in which we work out our frustrations. This is a dystopia. I am here to tell you that it is a dystopia that we have chosen for ourselves. And before I challenge my colleagues to do better, I just want to tell you a quick short story of how we got here, because this combination of anger and fear and guns is actually not new. It is worse now. Our rage is bigger. The number of guns on the street today is dizzying compared to just a few decades ago. But I have to be honest with you. The underlying problem of this combination is actually not new. In our early years, after our founding, America actually wasn't a fundamentally more violent place than our European neighbors. But a few things happened, about 50 years into the American story, that set America on a very different course--a course that, beginning in about 1840, made America an outlier of global violence, and we have never come back down to Earth. I think it is just interesting to sort of talk for a minute about those three things because they are relevant to today's discussion. First is the creation of America as a true melting pot. Waves of immigrants came to America beginning in the early to mid-1800s, looking for jobs and living space and partners. The competition amongst those groups, combined with demagogues and provocateurs who would pry on this friction, became explosive. People began to think that they needed to be suspicious of people who were different from them--a different race or ethnicity or religion. And, over time, if you look at American history, it is when these big waves of new immigration come to this country that we tend to have spikes in violence because those demagogues or those provocateurs tell us that we should be fearful of each other, and, all of a sudden, violence increases.  The second thing that happens in that period of time is the invention of the cotton gin. Why is that important? America was a slave nation at our founding. In 1800, we only had about 850,000 slaves. The cotton gin explodes the need for slaves. In 40 years, we go from 850,000 slaves to 2.4 million slaves, and the amount of violence that is necessary to keep that number of people in bondage is extraordinary. And the country--you can imagine this--just becomes anesthetized to violence. So, all of a sudden, violence rates go up amongst all Americans--not just White-on-Black violence, but White-on-White violence goes up, because violence is part of how we keep our economy running. Then, third, in the same period of time, the early to mid-1800s, we see the invention of the modern mass-produced handgun. The cotton gin is a Connecticut invention, and so is the modern mass-produced handgun. Now, other nations figured out how dangerous this was--the ability to slip into your coat pocket the means of lethal violence. Other nations decided to regulate the access that their citizens had to this instrument, but not in the United States.  So, quickly, shortly after the explosion of access to the handgun, violence rates began to increase. And given this history I talked about prior--our history of racial and ethnic violence--the decision not to regulate handgun access in any meaningful form was kind of like throwing gasoline on this raging fire. I am saying all of this because we have known for 200 years that this combination of violence between ethnic groups, violence as a means of subjugation, all supercharged by unlimited access to guns, is a uniquely American problem. Throughout our history--and this is the most important part--we have assiduously and purposefully, as a nation, tried to turn the dials of laws and norms and customs to have less hatred; to have less animosity toward each other; to have less oppression and less access to guns, at least for people who shouldn't have them. It is not a coincidence that the rates of violence in this Nation spike when we have waves of new immigrants, but then it settles out; it flattens. It often decreases as time goes on, and we learn how to live with each other. We change our norms and our customs. It is also not a coincidence that the biggest drops in lethal violence in this country tend to happen right after we make major adjustments to our Nation's firearms laws. What I am saying is that America is definitely set up to be a place more violent than other nations. We shouldn't expect that we are going to, with any set of changes, become as violent as European or Asian countries. But it doesn't have to be like this. Cheerleaders don't need to be shot when they walk into the wrong car. Teenagers don't need to be murdered because their music is too loud. Kids shouldn't fear for their life when they go to school or when they pick up their siblings from a house in the neighborhood. We can do better. We can adjust the dials in order to decide not to live in this dystopia. Everybody here knows what I feel about American gun laws. I am not going to litigate that question again here today. I think we can do better. I think we can just make it a little bit harder for irresponsible people, people with criminal records, people with serious mental illness to get their hands on deadly weapons. I want universal background checks. I want bans on the weapons that were designed for the military. But we also need to have a more apolitical discussion about the level of fear and hatred and mistrust in our society today that puts so many people on the edge, ready to fire a gun at somebody over the smallest threat or insult. There is just a collective anxiety in this country that we need to deal with and, frankly, doesn't require us to have debates that fall on easy political or partisan lines. Everybody in this body has an obligation to take steps so that today's demagogues and provocateurs--the same ones that convinced people in the 1840s that they should be fearful of new immigrants--have less air time and less influence. We shouldn't elevate political leaders who lead with messages of hate and division. That is part of what is driving America to fear everybody, to fear their neighbors. But we should also pass laws that incentivize our national dialogue to just be kinder and less hateful. Social media companies are making money off of hate and polarization, and we don't need to accept this. Holding them accountable for the ways that they have pit us against each other, that is not an impossible task and, frankly, not one we necessarily need to fight about along partisan lines. I will leave you with this. We also just need to ask some deeper questions about why people in America are just so unhappy and so alone that they would resort to violence this regularly and this casually.  A detective in Bridgeport, CT, told me the other day he barely ever responds to fistfights any longer. Everything, every beef ends up in gunfire. We have lost so many pathways in this country to positive meaning and positive identity and fulfilling connection to each other. People have less opportunity today to build healthy, economically secure, and personally fulfilling lives. We need to talk about why this is and what government can do to spiritually jump-start this Nation. It is not all about the gun laws. I think the gun laws should change, but there is also an anxiety of fearfulness in this Nation that we can have a collective conversation about. I get it. It is a big, huge, weighty conversation, but something stinks out there right now. We shouldn't accept this shoot-first culture--at kids, at cheerleaders, at students, at people shopping at grocery stores--as our new reality. It is a choice. America has always been a more violent place. That is true. But the degree of that violence has always been up to us. We have always had dials that we can turn. We should realize this, and we should do something about it. I yield the floor.