'What are we doing?' Chris Murphy asks fellow lawmakers in wake of school shooting

The congressman who once served as the representative for the town of Sandy Hook gave a rousing viral speech in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting in which an 18-year-old killed at least 19 children and two adults.

"What are we doing?" Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy asked his colleagues repeatedly, in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, begging them to pass legislation to stop the nation's gun violence crisis.

During his speech, Murphy put his hands together and pleaded with Republicans to help Democrats pass meaningful gun reform legislation. "I am here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees to beg my colleagues: Find a path forward here."

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"Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, or putting yourself in a position of authority if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing," he asked his Republican colleagues. While Republicans are often blamedfor their devotionto the gun lobbydespite continuous death across the U.S., Democrats, for their part, have also failedto pass any meaningful gun legislation. 

"Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store, to gun down African American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands," Murphy said, referencing first a deadly shooting in Buffaloin which a gunman killed 13 people, 11 of whom are Black. He also mentioned the deadliest school shooting on record in which 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary Schoolin December 2012, adding that "Sandy Hook will never ever be the same," and neither will this community in Texas. Since Sandy Hook, not much has been done to stop gun violence in the country.

Sen. Murphy is calling for changes to legislation because, as he put, "this happens nowhere else but here in the United States of America." But his calls might be landing on deaf ears. According to the Swiss-based research project the Small Arms Survey, there were 390 million guns in circulation in the U.S. in 2018 — that's twice as many guns in circulation than the nation with the second highest number of gun ownership, according to the BBC.

"This isn’t inevitable. These kids weren’t unlucky. This only happens in this country and nowhere else," Murphy said. "It is a choice. It is our choice to let it continue."

"I don't really have a good understanding why [there hasn't been more gun control legislation]," Ron Avi Astor, a mass shooting expert and UCLA professor, told NPR of the lack of change since Sandy Hook. "Maybe it is money. Maybe it is the gun lobby. Maybe it's become politicized and an ideological thing, but it should be treated as a public health measure."

Murphy told reporters after his speech that the line Republicans tendto use in thewake of mass shootings— blaming mental illness among the perpetrators — is a "bullshit" excuse. According to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

"We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world. You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness because we’re not an outlier on mental illness," Murphy told reporters, according to the Guardian. "We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their arms on firearms. That’s what makes America different."