After Uvalde, angry Democrats assail GOP over resistance to gun laws

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who once held a 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor on the need for stricter gun laws in the United States, returned there Tuesday night to plead with his colleagues to find a way to put politics aside and work together to stop the carnage of mass shootings.

Murphy was in the House in 2012 when a shooting took place in his district, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where 20 6- and 7-year-old children and six adults were killed. Now, a decade later, another gunman had entered an elementary school and taken the lives of 19 young children and two adults in Uvalde, Tex.

“What are we doing?” Murphy said, his voice raised. “Why are we here if not to try and make sure fewer schools and few communities go through what Sandy Hook has gone through, what Uvalde is going through. … I am here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues: Find a path forward here. Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.”

The aftermath of Sandy Hook was the closest Congress has come in the past decade to passing any meaningful changes to the nation’s gun laws, but when a modest bill to strengthen background checks came to a vote in the Senate, only four Republicans voted for it, while four Democrats, none of whom are still serving, voted against it. Since then, there has been only frustration and anger after mass shootings in places of worship, in stores, at a concert, at a nightclub, at a yoga studio and in schools, making many fear that anyplace in the United States could be next.