As This Senator Tried To Pass a Gun Control Bill, Another School Shooting Took Place

On Thursday (November 14), students at a high school just north of Los Angeles, California, were on lockdown. At least two students were killed and a couple of others were injured as soon as an armed classmate attacked Saugus High School in Santa Clarita.


That same morning, Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut were in Washington, D.C., Trying to pass a universal background check bill, H.R. 8. Murphy and Blumenthal have been trying to pass gun reform expenses with particular urgency since the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a perpetrator killed 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old. The bill the senators had been advocating for last week focused primarily on not allowing anyone in the U.S. To purchase a firearm if they cannot pass a background check; they had been attempting to bring it to vote for months. The bill passed the Residence of Representatives with some bipartisan support in February, although, like other progressive bills, has been contained up in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell (R-KY) serves as majority leader.


Murphy didn’t know about the shooting up until immediately after he tried to pass the bill, yet Blumenthal was speaking to the Senate about why they should pass the law as soon as he was handed a note about Saugus High School, ABC News reported. “As I speak on the floor now, there really is a school shooting in Santa [Clarita], California,” Blumenthal mentioned. “How can we turn in reverse? How can we resist to be able to see that shooting in real time, demanding our attention, requiring our action? We are complicit if we fail to act. It isn't just a political responsibility, it is a moral imperative.”


The bill was blocked by Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican senator from Mississippi who objected to the bill, told BuzzFeed News that the legislation “should not be fast-tracked by the Senate.”


“Many questions about this legislation need to be answered before it’s forced upon law-abiding gun owners,” Hyde-Smith mentioned. She did not decorative on which questions need to be answered, nor did she immediately respond to a request for comment from MTV News.


As Murphy told MTV News, “Under our rules, all it takes is one senator to object. And also a senator from Mississippi stood up and mentioned that she objected to the background check bill being brought up for a vote."


“My Republican colleagues had made it pretty clear that they are not going to change their mind,” Murphy added. “I've gotten pretty used to the idea that these school shootings are not going to change the minds of my Republican companions. Ultimately, we're going to have to beat them. And ultimately, we have to get people elected to Congress who are moved to action by these school shootings because no matter whether the number is two or 10 or 20 or 50, none of it appears to change the mind of people who have been in Washington [D.C.] For decades.”


Some of the Republicans who oppose this specific bill, and stricter gun control legislation overall, mention that background checks violate Second Amendment rights, even though the Founding Fathers ensured “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” decades before manufacturers created the kinds of guns accessible today. Even former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that the Second Amendment “is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whichever purpose."


While in a recent phone interview, MTV News spoke to Senator Murphy about why he thinks this bill is so hard to push by means of the Senate, why it’s time for reform right now, and where we go from here.


MTV News: You asked the Senate to pass the Universal Background Check Bill on Thursday (November 14), nine months after it was passed in the Home. Why did you pick to introduce it now?


Sen. Murphy: We asked the Senate to pass the bill yesterday because we're sick and tired of waiting. There really are mass murders each and every day in this nation. Some of these get some news attention once they happen in schools, nevertheless there really are shootings where countless folks are being killed in cities during the nation almost every day. And we're sick and tired of Congress doing nothing about it. So we went to the floor of the Senate yesterday and asked our colleagues to pass a bill that would require almost every gun buy in this nation to come with a criminal background check.


The reality is more than a few guns that are sold in this nation today don't have a background check ... We want almost every gun buy to go with a background check. And if we pass that law, research show that we may decrease gun murders in parts of the nation by 20 or 30 percent. That would save literally tens of thousands of lives.


MTV News: as soon as you brought this up, a Republican senator objected to it. Did that surprise you?


Sen. Murphy: I wasn't surprised. I expected that a Republican [might] come down and object to my motion. Certainly, I didn't know at the time that, as I was building a move attempt to bring the background check bill up for a vote in the Senate, news was breaking of another school shooting in California. It turned out pretty devastating to be able to see Republicans objecting to anti-gun violence legislation being brought before the Senate right at the moment that the nation was learning of another mass shooting. Although I've sort of gotten used to this.


What we need to do right now is ensure that we have voters who are really tuned into this provide, who are going to vote out people who aren't supporting gun legislation because I'm not sure we're going have the ability to convert them. I'm not sure we're going have the ability to change their minds while they're still in the Congress.


MTV News: How did you listen to what happened in California? Was it before or soon after Sen. Hyde-Smith objected to the bill?


Sen. Murphy: I gave my remarks on the Senate floor, I asked for permission to bring up the background check bill, and then soon following the objection was raised, I went back to my office. As soon as I walked into my office I was told that, Once I had been on the floor, news broke of this shooting. I was meeting with a Sandy Hook family who asked for a number of minutes to compose himself because he was so distraught at another school shooting. It was a reminder to me that, any time one of those school shootings happen, people who have been through them before — the parents who've lost kids at Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Virginia Tech — go through that trauma all over again.


MTV News: How would this bill and expenses like it better protect students?


Sen. Murphy: There's no one segment of legislation that's going to stop all shootings, whether it be in schools or in neighborhoods. ... We do know that if we pass a universal background check bill, we will save lives. Far less dangerous people will get guns and there'll be much less shootings.


there really are some mass shootings where the individual got the gun without a background check. This summer there was a mass shooting in Odessa, Texas where seven people were killed, 20 were injured, and the shooter in that state was denied a gun at a gun store. However then he just noticed a place in Texas that didn't need a background check — an internet sale — and he was able to get the gun that killed seven people. So that's why we need to close these loopholes as the everyday gun crimes that happen in our city neighborhoods can be reduced by getting more unlawful guns off the streets. And then some of those mass shootings are, case in point, carried out by guns that were paid for through these loopholes.


MTV News: If there isn’t one segment of legislation that's going to end gun violence in the U.S., What are some other ways that you could achieve this and better protect students and each person traumatized by gun violence?


Sen. Murphy: While the [perpetrator] in Santa Clarita had a pistol, the weapon of choice for most of those mass school shooters is the AR-15. This is a weapon that is designed to kill as several people as rapidly as possible. In far less than five minutes of shooting a AR-15-style weapon killed 20 kids [at Sandy Hook].


If we ban these assault weapons and if we ban these high-capacity magazines that hold 30 or a hundred bullets, [I believe] we'll cut down on the collection of people who are killed in these mass shootings although will also probably cause some of those mass shooters to not actually do it in the initial place.


This interview has been edited for clarity and length.