A Democratic US senator frustrated with congressional inaction on gun violence led a nearly 15-hour Senate filibuster before yielding the floor early yesterday, making a pledge that he and his colleagues would press hard for more gun control three days after 49 people were killed at a Florida nightclub.
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy ended a series of speeches with his Democratic colleagues at 2:11am after promising at the outset that he would remain on the Senate floor “until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together.”
At the end, he said he had won commitments from Republican leaders that they would hold votes on amendments to expand background checks and ban gun sales to suspected terrorists.
Photo: Reuters
It is unlikely that those amendments would pass.
Murphy evoked the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conneticut, and ended his long day with a story of a young boy who was killed in that massacre.
Twenty children and six educators died in a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012.
Murphy, 42 and the father of two young boys, said he cannot look into the eyes of those children’s relatives and tell them that Congress has done nothing since.
“For those of us that represent Connecticut, the failure of this body to do anything, anything at all in the face of that continued slaughter isn’t just painful to us, it’s unconscionable,” Murphy said.
Murphy’s filibuster started on Wednesday as presumptive Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would meet with the National Rifle Association (NRA) about the terror watch list and gun purchases.
The tragedy in Orlando, Florida early on Sunday was the worst mass shooting in modern US history.
The election-year fight over gun control in the wake of the shootings pits strong proponents of the Second Amendment right to bear arms against those arguing for greater restrictions on the ability to obtain weapons.
Trump, who has the endorsement of the NRA, told a rally in Georgia, “I’m going to save your Second Amendment.”
Attempts at compromise appeared to collapse within hours of surfacing in the Senate on Wednesday, underscoring the extreme difficulty of resolving the divisive issue five months to the US presidential election.
Murphy began speaking at 11:21am, and he showed few signs of fatigue as it ended. By Senate rules, he had to stand at his desk to maintain control of the floor. When asked by another senator how he was feeling just before 7:30pm, Murphy said rehabilitation from a back injury in his 20s had helped him build up endurance.
As tourists and staff — and at one point in the evening, Murphy’s two sons — looked on from the galleries, the senator maintained his filibuster to a mostly empty chamber, save for a series of Democratic senators who joined him and made their own speeches through the day. Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal and Cory Booker stayed with Murphy on the floor for most of the debate.
It has been nearly a decade since Congress made any significant changes to federal gun laws. In April 2007, Congress passed a law to strengthen the instant background check system after it was discovered a shooter at Virginia Tech who killed 32 people was able to purchase his weapons because his mental health history was not in the instant background check database.
Murphy is seeking a vote on legislation from Feinstein that would let the government bar sales of guns and explosives to people it suspects of being terrorists. Feinstein offered a similar version of the amendment in December last year, a day after an extremist couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, but the Republican-run Senate rejected the proposal on a near party-line vote.
Murphy also wants a vote to expand background checks.
The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to coworkers. However, he was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.
Cornyn and other Republicans argue that Feinstein’s bill denies due process to people who might be on the terror list erroneously and are trying to exercise their constitutional right to gun ownership.
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