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Congressional Daily Record
This section covers nominations, confirmations, or other executive branch business. It mentions members such as Christopher Murphy.
Official title: Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (Executive Calendar)
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June 24, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor with good news. It is really important news, but it is news that not a lot of people in this country know about. We are experiencing, over the last 3 years, a dramatic decline in the number of people who are killed by guns. Gun violence rates in this country are plummeting, and they have been plummeting since 2002.
Let me just give you a couple of numbers. From 2023 to 2024—the last year that we have full numbers for—we saw urban gun homicides drop by 16.7 percent. That is extraordinary. And, in general, urban homicides have been dropping by double-digit percentages over the last 3 years.
Mass shootings are way down. That might actually make sense to you because, while we still hear about these awful mass shootings on the news, we have a sense that they are not appearing on our television screens with the rapidity and frequency they were a few years ago.
Now, in 2025, there were 400 mass shootings in America. That is unacceptable. There are still more mass shootings than days in the year, but that is a 41-percent decline from 2021.
Similarly, school shootings have declined over the last 2 years.
This is all good news. There are more people alive today because something is changing in America. And while it is still unacceptable that we are averaging a mass shooting every day in this country, the numbers are unquestionably heading in the right direction.
happening, but it is not coincidental to the passage in 2022 of the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in 30 years. And that is why I am on the floor today, because tomorrow will mark 4 years since this Senate passed and got signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that strengthened the gun laws of this country while respecting the constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to be able to purchase and own weapons.
legislation. It received Republican votes in the House of Representatives as well.
This legislation said: Listen, we have got to be a little bit more careful before we sell an assault weapon to a 19-year-old or a 20-year- old—because we had seen, over and over again, that it tended to be, unfortunately, young men under the age of 21 who were carrying out these mass murders.
under 21 to buy a weapon—because this is what we needed in order to get bipartisan consensus—we did put enhanced background checks for those individuals—just an extra check, most significantly, with the local police department to see if this was somebody that the police knew as being troubled. Well, since passage of the bill, 800 firearms purchases have been prevented solely because of these enhanced checks.
weapon, but until you called the local police department, you didn't find out that they were actually prohibited. But sometimes it was that this was an individual that was in crisis. The local police department knew it, and the enhanced check caught them.
Federal crime. It was crazy that it hadn't been. It made trafficking and straw purchasing a Federal crime. And since that bill went into effect, there have been 280 cases with 525 defendants who have been brought under Federal charges for gun trafficking. That is a big part of why there is so much urban gun homicide—because there is a pipeline of illegal guns that goes into places like Hartford, CT; New Haven, CT; or Chicago, IL. Now we have interrupted that pipeline of illegal guns.
What is something else that that bill did? It said that if you have a history of domestic violence, you can't buy a weapon, regardless of whether that violence is against your wife or your girlfriend. There used to be something called the boyfriend loophole. If you had committed domestic violence against your girlfriend, you could still purchase and have weapons. Well, we closed that loophole on a bipartisan basis. And since that law passed, there have been 10,000 firearms purchases that have been denied because the individual had a history of domestic violence.
to give the ability of that individual to reapply for the ability to buy firearms. We didn't take that right away permanently. Some of us might have wanted that prohibition to be permanent after you have a domestic violence conviction on your record, but that is how we got the bill passed—an example of how we can find common ground.
$1.4 billion into funding existing and new community anti-gun violence measures—and this is maybe the secret sauce. This is maybe the biggest explanation as to why numbers are going down.
rates of gun violence is that it is normally a very small group of people—again, largely young men—that are committing these acts of violence and that if you engage in targeted interventions aimed at these small groups of young men, you can very quickly get gun violence rates down, and it doesn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in a small community like Hartford.
that do this community anti-gun violence work. We gave them a small amount of money from this legislation, and they have made a big, big difference in Hartford. These are groups like Hartford Communities That Care, Compass.
Hartford had 37 murders in 2022, the year that we passed this bill. In 2025, Hartford had 10 murders. That is an extraordinary decline, 37 to 10.
in shootings. They get badly wounded. Their lives are altered by the shooting even though they don't die.
Mr. President, 223 shootings in Hartford in 2020—89 last year. That is a 25-year low. And all the laws we passed made a difference in Connecticut, but Connecticut already had pretty strict gun laws so a lot of the stuff we passed didn't have a big impact on Connecticut, but the community anti-gun violence money did because those groups are now well-funded.
Again, these aren't groups with $10 million-a-year budgets. These are often very small organizations that have four or five people on staff. For instance, one of the things that these groups often do is when there is a shooting, they rush to the emergency room because there are often cycles of retributive violence that play out: Somebody gets shot. Their group of friends congregate at the emergency room. They make a plan to engage in retributive violence. Well, these community workers can often get to the emergency room and interrupt that cycle of violence, and they have been enormously successful.
Now, there are threats to the progress we have made. I don't want to make this a speech about President Trump, but it is just true that he has stopped funding the programs that support community anti-gun violence initiatives.
school-based mental health, and he has also suspended many of those accounts. That is bad news.
bill,
background checks or the ability of prosecutors to go after gun traffickers or the denial of weapons purchases to individuals convicted of domestic violence.
unwinding all of our progress. He is unwinding some of our progress— our bipartisan progress—but much of the statute can't be unwound.
years ago, after the awful shooting in Uvalde, four Senators got together—supported by another bigger ring of bipartisan Senators—and we were able to come up with a bill that was not perfect, was not everything that I wanted or that many other Democratic Senators wanted, but it was progress.
And we have seen the impact of that bill: literally extraordinary declines in mass shootings and homicides, all happening, not coincidentally, as soon as we passed that bill.
guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The gun lobby says the answer to gun violence is more guns. Well, we proved that if you pass legislation that just makes it a little bit harder for the wrong people to get their hands on weapons—people who have serious criminal convictions, people who are mentally ill—you make it a little bit easier for prosecutors to go after the gun traffickers, you give a little bit more resources to the people who do anti-gun violence work in our communities, that you can make a big difference.
neighborhoods. I live just south of downtown in Hartford, and my home is on the route to the primary critical care hospital in the south end of Hartford—Hartford Hospital. And I will just say: There are far fewer ambulances passing my house with victims of gunshot wounds. In fact, it is an extraordinary reduction.
shootings—223 gun violence victims being rushed to Hartford Hospital or Saint Francis Hospital. In 2025, there were 89. So I know we are often consumed with the bad news here, but that is really good news. That is really good news. And it is evidence of the fact that this place is not fundamentally broken. There are these moments when Republicans and Democrats can come together and pass laws that save lives—4 years since the passage and signature of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, something that this Senate should be proud of.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.