Sen. Murphy on Gun Laws: 'We’ve Reached a Point Where Nothing Is Not an Option'

GEIST: “Joining us now Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. He’s a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator, good morning. It’s good to have you back with us. Let’s talk about Nashville and Louisville and everything we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks and the energy that we’ve seen around gun safety, including, by the way, from the Republican Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, who talked about strengthening Red Flag laws. I know it’s not everything everyone would want but perhaps one step toward preventing some of these horrible tragedies that we see several times a week at this point in this country.”

MURPHY: “And of course, Willie, as you know, it’s important to remember that, well, the country gets captured by stories of these mass shootings every single day, there’s over 100 people dying from gun violence, many of those are suicides, homicides, accidental shooting. So every single day, there’s mass slaughter in this country, and it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the high income world besides the United States. But I think you are right. I mean, we are seeing a paradigm shift. It began last summer, when after Uvalde, Congress passed the first gun safety measure of any significance in 30 years, even though the NRA opposed that legislation. And it continues now this spring as you see a very conservative Republican Governor Bill Lee, proposing that the legislature passed a Red Flag law, again, a measure that the NRA doesn’t like. But Red Flag laws are not insignificant. They really do work. In Florida that passed their Red Flag laws shortly after Parkland, they’ve used it 6,000 times to take guns away from people who are threatening harm against others or threatening harm against themselves. So it’s good news that you see Republicans like Bill Lee stepping up and saying, it’s time for us to do something. I think you’re going to have more and more states, red states and blue states acting for one reason and one reason only. Voters are not going to allow politicians to stand by and do nothing. What you saw in Tennessee with this it’s just overwhelming show of support from kids and parents to backup those Tennessee lawmakers to demand change. That’s happening all over the country. And so there’ll be more action at the federal level. There’ll be increasing pace of action at the state level. It’s not going to all happen at once but, we’ve reached a point where nothing is not an option.”