PHILADELPHIA — Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told the Democratic National Convention Wednesday that he’s “furious” Congress failed to enact a new gun control law this year that would have barred people who appear on the government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm.
“I am furious, furious, that in three years since Sandy Hook, three years of almost daily bloodshed in our cities, the Republican Congress has done absolutely nothing to prevent the next massacre. It stokes inside me a sense of outrage I’ve never felt before,” Murphy said.
“I’m here today because I want a president who shares that same sense of outrage,” he added as he praised Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “Outrage that the gun lobby fights to keep open glaring loopholes that 90 percent of Americans want closed. Outrage that a suspected terrorist can walk into a store and walk out with a military-style, semi-automatic rifle.”
In June, a shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., renewed pro-gun control lawmakers’ efforts to pass legislation that would block people who appear on the government’s terrorist watch list from buying a firearm.
The watch list is a secretive database established in 2003 under the Bush administration, and includes people suspected, but not convicted, of terrorism.
Opponents of Murphy’s proposal, which included the National Rifle Association, argued his plan could violate the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires “due process of law,” and says no one can be held to answer for a crime “unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury.”
Murphy said at the time that Fifth Amendment-related concerns were “ridiculous,” and called the argument a “red herring.”
The legislation went on to die in Congress, which Murphy lamented before the Democratic crowd.
“This is a fate we cannot accept. And my friends, there is no reason to feel helpless about the horrifying trajectory of cascading massacres,” he said Wednesday. “We can change this. Smart gun policy, like background checks, can change this.”
Murphy promised his convention audience that Clinton had the “empathy, and the guts” to do something about the “nightly bloodshed on our city streets” and “police officers being outgunned [and] ambushed.”
“Hillary Clinton didn’t have to make fighting gun violence a centerpiece of her campaign. I’m sure people told her it wasn’t worth the political risk. But she held firm. She stood up to the NRA and pledged to take Washington back from the gun lobby,” Murphy said.
