Sen. Murphy on Guns: ‘We Have Always Been a More Violent Nation’ than Others

EXCERPT:

MURPHY: "If you look back over the history of this country, we have always been a more violent nation than our parent nations in Europe, from which a lot of the original settlers came from. But we are more violent now by a factor of five or six, in some cases a factor of 20, because the vast majority of our violence in this country today is done by guns, and the data tells you that the places in the United States that have invested in the kinds of reforms we'd like to take nationally like universal background checks, or the bans on certain very dangerous high capacity weapons, violence rates are much lower, gun deaths are much lower. And so it’s not a guessing game as to what works here if you actually want to reduce the number of people who are killed by guns. We know ultimately what works. And maybe one of my chief frustrations continues to be the fact that we only get attention on the issue of gun violence when 50 people are killed or when it’s the one-year mark of 50 people being killed."