Sen. Chris Murphy regrets not working on gun control before Sandy Hook

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Chris Murphy was with his wife and two young children on Dec. 14, 2012, waiting for a train to New York City to see the Christmas decorations, when he got word that there had been a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“At first I thought it was a workplace shooting, and I could monitor the situation from my trip,” Murphy recalled in a phone interview with Yahoo News on Tuesday. “But then as the train was approaching, I got news that children had been shot.”

Murphy, a congressman representing Newtown who had been elected to the Senate just weeks before, left his family and drove straight to Sandy Hook. “I literally left my kids on the train platform with my wife,” he said.

Murphy was one of the first people to arrive at the firehouse near the school. There he received the news that of the 26 people killed at the school, 20 were children.

“It was the most awful thing I've ever been a part of,” Murphy recalled. “And of course, you know, I was just a voyeur to other people's incalculable life-changing grief that day.”

It changed Murphy’s life, too. He was 39 and about to become the youngest member of the U.S. Senate.

“I was the same age as those parents in Sandy Hook,” he said. “My kids were the same age as their kids. So, you know, I felt Sandy Hook first and foremost as a human being and as a parent and secondarily as an incoming senator.

“I acquired a cause that day on behalf of those families and on behalf of that community,” he said. “I knew that I had to try to get laws passed that reduced the likelihood that anything like that would ever happen again.”

It took nearly 10 years — and countless other mass shootings — for Congress to pass meaningful gun legislation. But it did so this past summer, with Murphy leading a bipartisan effort following the deadly mass shootings at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

In June, President Biden signed into law a landmark package that bolstered mental health programs and closed the so-called boyfriend loophole, under which unmarried people convicted of domestic abuse could still obtain weapons.

For many lawmakers, the deaths of 19 young children in Uvalde was apparently a tipping point. On the day of that massacre, Murphy delivered an emotional plea to his colleagues to address gun violence.

“What are we doing? What are we doing?” he said in a speech on the Senate floor. “Days after a shooter walked into a grocery to gun down African American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands. What are we doing?"

“Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate?” Murphy said. “Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

But before Sandy Hook, Murphy could have counted himself among lawmakers who failed to confront the issue.

“I had not worked on the issue of gun violence prior to Dec. 14, 2012,” he said. “I'm deeply embarrassed by that. I should have been working on this issue.”

Murphy said it was important for the Newtown community that Congress was able to pass meaningful gun legislation before the 10th anniversary of the massacre.

“I do think it is important that we were able to finally get something done this summer,” he said. “December was gonna be awful no matter what, but at least the community sees that this country is finally making progress to try to make these shootings less likely.”

Murphy admits he thought meaningful change would have happened sooner. “I was among those who thought Sandy Hook would change everything,” he said. “I was sad and shocked by many of my colleagues’ indifference in the months afterwards.”

But he’s optimistic that Congress can continue to come together on gun violence legislation.

“I feel like we are entering an era in which we're gonna be able to repeatedly change the nation's gun laws,” he said. “It may be incrementally, but in a consistent way that makes the country safer.”

He added: “The awful thing about this issue is that Republican interest to act tends to only pop up after 20 or 30 people are shot. I wish my colleagues understood that there's, you know, slaughter happening every single day in this country. But I think we're at a moment where Republicans realize that their electoral fortunes are tied to being more reasonable on the issue of moderating the nation’s very loose gun laws.”