-Our first guest tonight is
a United States senator
from the great state of Connecticut.
Please welcome to the show Senator Chris Murphy.
[ Cheering and applause ] Thank you for being with us, Senator.
-Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
-Obviously not the easiest day, but we really do appreciate
you making the time to try to put the events of yesterday
in context, if that's at all possible.
You know, one of the messages we're trying to get across today
is it's not hopeless.
Is that one of the things you find yourself,
as one of the leading advocates of gun control,
do you find yourself running up against people
who feel like it is, in fact, hopeless?
-Of course. In Europe at this moment,
where there are so many Americans
who, you know, have become so anesthetized, so numb,
to the pace of these mass shootings.
I just can't let that happen.
I can't let people in this country believe
that we can't change this, because we can.
We're the only country in the high-income world
where kids fear for their lives when they go to school.
We have power over this. We have agency.
And, as I'm speaking to you, I'm literally in touch with,
you know, a half dozen or more Republican senators
that are interested in sitting down
and talking about a path forward.
I don't know whether we'll get there,
to a bipartisan product, but I'm going to try
because, as a parent of two school-age kids,
I just can't believe that we're going to allow this to continue.
And I have to believe that we can find
a handful of Republicans in the United States Senate
that are willing to work on us
to make our schools and our shopping malls
and our movie theaters just a little bit safer.
-So, you were elected in 2012 and then Sandy Hook,
which was obviously in your state, happened.
I feel like that was a moment where people thought,
"Surely, something will change now."
How do you reflect back on the last decade since that happened?
-Well, that's what I thought, too.
I mean, I thought, if the murder of 20 kids
in an elementary school in Connecticut
doesn't change the dynamic on this issue, what will?
But I quickly changed my mind because what I realized is
that this is all about political power.
I wish it weren't, but it is.
And, in 2013, when Sandy Hook happened,
the NRA had tons of political power.
The gun lobby had tons of political power,
and we had none.
There really wasn't an anti-gun violence movement in 2013.
So we've spent the last ten years building up our power.
We now have all these amazing groups --
Gabby Giffords, March for Our Lives,
and Moms Demand Action --
and the gun lobby is weaker, you know,
they're practically bankrupt.
And so we're at this moment where maybe, maybe, maybe,
the balance of political power has shifted.
Maybe enough voters care about this
that they're going to send a message --
"If you don't vote with us, if you don't vote with our kids,
we're voting you out of office."
But it's taken ten years to really equalize
the political power on the issue of guns.
Back then, we just had none of it
and they had all of it and that's why we lost.
-So, you were actually presiding on the Senate floor
when this tragedy happened yesterday
and you gave your fiery speech
that we've already referenced tonight in the show.
What was the energy like in the room
when you're giving that speech?
Are other senators there?
Do you feel like they're listening?
-I mean, a lot of people were listening.
There were only a handful of senators there,
but I know, because I've talked to many of them,
that a lot of them heard what I said.
You know, I was sitting in the Senate chamber.
I was actually presiding over the Senate
when my phone started to blow up
and I looked down to realize
that we had another Sandy Hook on our hands.
And I decided to go down to the floor immediately after
and, you know, just say simply to my colleagues, right,
"Why on Earth did you spend all this time running
for the United States Senate, if you're going to do nothing?"
And I don't know whether my colleagues
can be shamed into doing something,
but I'm just not going to let them off the hook.
I'm not going to let this place do nothing
and get away without at least some rebuke on the Senate floor.
So we'll see. There's a lot of Republicans,
because of what I said and because
of what their constituents have said to them in phone calls
and emails over the last 24 hours,
that are reaching out to work with us
and we'll see if we can get something done.
-It seems like Republicans do a very good job
of framing this issue in a fear-based way of,
"They're coming to take away your guns."
There are many versions of legislation
where that will not be the case.
There will be modifications, there will be steps,
you know, closing loopholes,
things like that, banning assault rifles.
Why do you feel like they're so strong at framing the narrative?
And it strikes me that Democrats have done a poorer job.
-Well, you know, that's interesting,
that you put it that way, because, actually,
if you look at the polling on this,
there are very few issues in America
in which 90% of people in this country agree on anything
and 90% of Americans think that you should have
universal background checks.
Actually, the majority of Republicans
now support an assault weapons ban.
The problem is very much just, in this town,
Republicans, for whatever reason,
are so afraid of the gun lobby, the NRA,
that they can't get out of their own way.
So I actually think we've won this debate
in the American public.
We just need voters, now, to do more
than sort of click the right answer on a poll.
We need voters to say, "Hey, in this next election,
I'm going to ask the candidates,
'Do you support banning assault weapons?
Do you support universal background checks?'
and not vote for the folks that give the wrong answer."
-You talk about the fact that you've won on the issue,
but you've also been critical of Democrats
not wanting to run on it.
Don't you feel like there is --
If the GOP's afraid of the gun lobby,
it strikes me that the Democrats are afraid of something
because they don't run on it in a way that --
certainly not as strongly as you lay it out.
-Yeah, we're sort of stuck in a world that doesn't exist.
Democrats think that we will lose votes
if we talk about gun violence, and that's just not true.
In fact, in 2018,
record numbers of young people turned out in that election.
Democrats won control of the House of Representatives. Why?
Because we talked about the issue of gun violence.
So, the NRA has kind of created this mythology
that running on things like background checks
is a losing political issue.
It's the exact opposite.
It actually convinces a lot of people
who weren't planning on turning out to turn out,
and it's a lot of swing voters who want to hear Democrats,
want to hear candidates, talk about
the most pressing moral issue that they and their kids face,
which, right now, is the fear that our kids have
for their lives when they walk into schools.
We have to talk about this
and we'll win votes if we talk about it.
-Sometimes I think there's a frustration at a distance --
maybe people don't understand quite how it works in D.C. --
at the speed in which things happen.
It always strikes me as a little bit slower than it should,
especially after a tragedy like this.
When do you see, when you predict,
any vote coming to the floor that would actually
force Republicans to choose a side to land on?
-Well, the other thing to sort of note here is
that the reason why it's taking so long is
because of the rules in the Senate, right?
You've got this rule that says 50 votes isn't good enough.
You need 60 votes.
So the voters kind of did their job.
They elected a majority in the Senate,
a majority in the House, and a president who all support
something like universal background checks.
The problem is we have 50 votes in the Senate, not 60 votes.
So, you know, part of what has to happen here is
that we change the rules of the Senate so that,
if the voters put majorities in charge of everything,
then they actually get what they are asking for.
And, in this case, they're asking
for universal background checks
and they're only not getting it
because we've got this silly sort of
19-, you know, -50s-era rule in the Senate
that requires 60 votes.
-Obviously, from your time
visiting, speaking with people in the community of Sandy Hook,
you are acutely aware that maybe the rest of us move on,
but communities where something like this happen never do.
-Never do.
Never do.
Sandy Hook will never, ever be the same.
Because the research tells us,
for every individual that's killed,
there are 20 people who know them,
20 relatives and friends who experience trauma.
You know, I tell the story in Newtown.
I told it on the floor just last night.
You know, afterwards, when those kids came back to that school,
they had to have this procedure in place that,
when a kid had a memory of what he saw that day,
you know, stepping over his dead bodies --
his classmates' dead bodies,
they would scream out a safe word
and that paraprofessionals and psychologists
and psychiatrists would come and help them.
In one classroom, that word was monkey.
And so all throughout the day,
kids would be screaming out, "Monkey! Monkey!"
And paraprofessionals would come and help them.
That's just a sign of how devastating this is,
how the pain never goes away in a place like Newtown.
It's never going to go away in Uvalde.
And we just have a moral obligation,
as a nation, to try to make sure
that this doesn't happen to another community
because you don't recover from this.
As a family, you don't recover
and, as a community, you don't recover.
So why on Earth do we allow
for communities to still go through this?
-I'd love -- I would really love and appreciate
if you could leave us with any path forward,
any reason for optimism,
anything those of us watching
who believe that there is some step of gun control we can take,
what we can be doing.
-Well, I just want to make sure people know
lots of things have changed since Sandy Hook.
In fact, there have been dozens of states that have passed laws
that have tightened gun laws and have saved lives.
The NRA is weaker than they were in 2013.
The gun violence movement is stronger.
When Republicans had control of the entire Congress,
the NRA got nothing from the Republican Congress.
They used to get everything
when Republicans were in charge. Why?
Because Republicans maybe aren't willing, yet, to vote with us,
but they're not willing any longer to vote with the NRA.
I know that people want this all to happen overnight,
but it took ten years from when James Brady was shot
during the assassination attempt to President Reagan
until the James Brady background check law was passed.
It took over ten years
from the open casket of Emmett Till
until the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Sometimes, in this country, it does take a decade or more
to get great social change passed.
And we have made a lot of progress,
more progress than people think and, boy,
there's no more important issue to continue to stay active on.
Don't let obstacles stand in the way of your advocacy.
We will get this done, in the end.
-Senator, I cannot thank you enough
for giving us your time today.
Keep up the good fight and we really appreciate it.
-Thanks, Seth. [ Cheering and applause ]
-Senator Chris Murphy, everybody. We'll be right back.