For 14 hours and 50 minutes, CT senator Chris Murphy took to the Senate floor demanding a vote on expanding gun background checks and preventing those on the terror watch lists from buying firearms.
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“I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of the ongoing slaughter of innocents, and I’ve had enough of inaction in this body”, Murphy said during the filibuster, according to an NBC News report.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) couldn’t say Thursday whether the gun control laws Senate Democrats are pushing in Congress would have stopped the Orlando terrorist from carrying out his massacre.
“When we began there was no commitment, no plan to debate these measures”, Murphy, of CT, said during the 15th hour of the filibuster early on Thursday. The two items on the agenda include universal background checks and making it illegal for possible terrorists to buy guns.
“We can’t accept that the only point of leverage that we have are these mass shootings – that was the point of our filibuster yesterday, is that this is happening every day”, he said.
Leading Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had been involved in talks with Republican Senator John Cornyn, said there was no resolution.
“I want to introduce you to Dylan Christopher Jack Hockley, who in this picture is age six”, Murphy told the Senate, holding up a photo. He says he can’t look into the eyes of the children’s families and tell them that Congress has done nothing since. Sunday brought the deadliest mass shooting in modern USA history at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, which ended in 49 deaths from a gunman wielding an AR-15.
In a statement, the NRA said it was happy to meet with Trump and reiterated its support for a bill from Cornyn that would let the government delay firearms sales to suspected terrorists for up to 72 hours.
“No guarantee that those amendments pass but we’ll have some time to … prevail upon members to take these measures and turn them into law”, Murphy said.
On the other side of this issue many law-abiding gun owners argue that gun reform will not keep guns out of the hands of the criminals.
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The last filibuster to garner such widespread attention was that of then-Democratic Senator Wendy Davis, who spoke for 11 hours in order to block the passage of a bill that proposed banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. “There is a fundamental disconnect with the American people when these tragedies continue to occur and we just move forward with business as usual”. Other legislators expressed their support of the filibuster, including representatives from CT who returned to the chamber and Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen.
