Meet the Senator Who Filibustered for 15 Hours on Gun Control
Last Tuesday night, three days after 49 people were brutally gunned down at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Sen. Chris Murphy reached a breaking point. The Connecticut Democrat, who was elected to the Senate just a month before the Sandy Hook shooting, is one of Congress’ most vocal anti-gun-violence crusaders — though, like those of all other gun-reform advocates, his efforts have largely come to naught. There have been 20 more mass shootings in the U.S. since 26 people, including 20 children, were killed at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school in December 2012, according to a tally by Mother Jones (which defines a mass shooting as one in which three or more people are killed, not including the shooter); nine of those incidents have occurred in just the past 12 months.
“Every single time this happens, it is devastating,” the 42-year-old Murphy, one of the Senate’s youngest members, tells Rolling Stone, noting the “indescribable ripples of grief” Sandy Hook parents continue to feel.
On Wednesday morning, with a new appropriations vote looming in the Senate, and Republicans once again refusing to allow any debate on reigning in guns, Murphy announced he’d had enough — or #Enough, as he posted on Twitter. Dressed in a sharp blue suit and dress shoes, he began to talk — and talk — in a remarkable 15-hour filibuster intended to force the Senate to take up the issue of guns.
“As I was heading to the floor, I thought to myself, ‘What if this is a big failure and nobody pays attention?'” he says. Instead, Murphy, who had initial support from from fellow Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal and New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker, was ultimately joined by nearly every other Democrat in the Senate, engaged in perhaps the country’s first national conversation on guns held by elected officials.
The filibuster, which ended at 2:30 the following morning, yielded a promise from Senate Republicans that they would allow a series of gun-safety measures — two of them sponsored by Democrats, and two by Republicans — to reach the floor. Of the two Democratic proposals, one, authored by Sen. Diane Feinstein, would block anyone on the terrorist watch list or any other federal terrorism databases from purchasing guns or explosives; the other, written by Murphy, would expand background checks to include guns purchased online or at gun shows. Republicans, who see the Feinstein measure as too broad, will introduce a competing bill, endorsed by the NRA, to put a 72-hour hold on all gun purchases by those on the terrorist watch list, and will also introduce a measure that rejects universal background checks and instead will focus on mental health.
All these bills are expected to fail — as similar measures have failed since 2013. Murphy, however, remains undeterred. “There is not something fundamentally different about the American DNA that causes us to have a level of gun violence that is 20 times that of other first-world nations,” he says. “It happens here because we choose to allow it to happen. We have a celebratory culture of guns, and the loosest firearms laws in the world.”