Chris Murphy: On gun violence, Republicans ‘don’t seem to give a crap about our children’ 

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Tuesday said that Republicans “don’t seem to give a crap about our children” when it comes to addressing gun violence.

“It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don’t seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence,” Murphy told Salon in an interview for “Salon Talks.” 

The senator, a longtime proponent of gun control, argued the threat of gun violence exposes children’s developing brains to “war-like levels of trauma.” 

“We can’t catalog the epidemic of gun violence merely by how many shootings we’ve had or even how many homicides we’ve had. You have to talk about a generation of kids, specifically in these violence-prone neighborhoods, that we are literally losing because their brains change when they’re exposed to war-like levels of trauma,” Murphy said. 

He posited that “it’s not a coincidence that all the underperforming schools in this country are in the violent neighborhoods,” where the threat of violence impacts students’ ability to focus on learning while in school.

Murphy was a primary negotiator of the major gun safety legislation that passed last year. Last month, in the wake of a shooting that left three students dead at Michigan State University, he reintroduced legislation to require background checks on all commercial gun purchases nationwide.

Murphy also stressed his concern about the explosion of gun purchase rates in the last few years, which “really supercharged during the pandemic” and means “there are exponentially more weapons out there today than ever before. 

“I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us,” he said of the high gun buy rates.