By Mark Pazniokas / CTMirror.org
“What are we doing?”
An anguished U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut asked the question seven times Tuesday in brief remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He spoke as the death toll in America’s latest mass shooting in Texas reached 16 — a teacher, 14 children and their 18-year-old killer.
The tragic toll would grow 21 hours later — to 19 students and two teachers.
“What are we doing? Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African-American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands,” the Democratic legislator said, referring to the mass shooting at a Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket.
“What are we doing?”
The shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday was the deadliest of the more than 200 mass shootings recorded in the United States in the first five months of 2022.
It was also the worst school shooting since the massacre of 20 young students and six school staffers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012.
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In Westport, Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice issued a statement on the shooting Tuesday night, saying: “I just wish I had something magical to say that would console and comfort the heartache so many in our community feel in the aftermath of the massacre of young children in a Texas elementary school today. But, I do not. There is nothing I can say to ease that heartache. I can only feel that pain along with you …
“However, I want to assure each member of our community that when the bell rings in the morning, we will be ready to receive our students, your children, with the care and responsibility that professional educators embody. Our team will be ready.”
Valerie Babich, the Westport school district’s director of psychological services, “has mobilized, along with her team and the entire district administrative team, to provide guidance for each of our three levels, elementary, middle and high school,” the superintendent said.
Scarice said there will be “police presence” at all of Westport’s schools Wednesday after making that request to Police Chief Foti Koskinas.
“Our schools are not at risk, yet this collaboration and support with our local police department is reassuring for many in our community,” Scarice wrote.
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“There are more mass shootings than days in the year,” Murphy said in his Senate remarks. “Our kids are living in fear every single time they set foot in a classroom, because they think they’re going to be next.”
“What are we doing?”
No significant federal gun legislation since Sandy Hook
The answer in the U.S. Senate has been nothing. The universal background checks required to purchase a gun in Connecticut, a key change after Sandy Hook, have been a non-starter in Congress.
It wasn’t what Joe Biden, then the vice president, told an audience in Connecticut nine years ago after the Sandy Hook tragedy. “The American people are with us,” Biden told Murphy and others that day. “You should know, there is a moral price for inaction.”
Murphy has a singular status in the Senate. On the Friday 11 days before Christmas in 2012, Murphy bore witness to parents who learned in a firehouse that their first-graders lay dead in classrooms up the hill at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Murphy a consistent advocate for “gun safety”
On the Senate floor, Murphy treads a fine line when he talks about “gun safety,” the phrase now preferred over “gun control.” In the past, he has said he seeks to discomfit Republicans in their opposition to background checks, not harden them.
“Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate?”Murphy asked Tuesday. “Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job or putting yourself in a position of authority if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?
“What are we doing? Why are you here?”
In December 2021, not long after four students were shot to death at Oxford High School in Michigan, Murphy talked about playing the long game on background checks, of making sure that Americans do not accept that nothing can be done. His biggest worry then was that mass shootings become normalized.
Inaction is “a choice”
It seemed in his thoughts Tuesday.
“This isn’t inevitable. These kids weren’t unlucky. This only happens in this country. And nowhere else. Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day,” Murphy said.
“Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids, as I have had to do, about why they got locked into a bathroom and told to be quiet for five minutes just in case a bad man entered that building. Nowhere else does that happen except here in the United States of America. It is a choice. It is our choice to let it continue.”
The Sandy Hook victims would be in high school this year. Their surviving classmates were taught safe words to use when they felt overwhelmed, Murphy said. In one classroom, the safe word was “monkey,” a summons for a teacher or a paraprofessional to come and talk.
“Sandy Hook will never ever be the same. This community in Texas will never ever be the same. Why? Why are we here, if not to try to make sure that fewer schools and fewer communities go through what Sandy Hook has gone through, what Uvalde already is going through,” Murphy said. “Our heart is breaking for these families.”
In District of Columbia vs. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a broad ban on guns in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and affirmed a constitutional right to possess firearms in the home for protection.
Murphy has suggested that Heller should reassure gun owners there is no slippery slope to gun confiscation or widespread bans, that background checks and safe storage laws are no threat to the Second Amendment.
Begging for change
On Tuesday, he pleaded for Republicans in the evenly divided Senate to join him in negotiations.
“I’m here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues,” Murphy said.
He leaned forward, hands pressed together.
“Find a path forward here. Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely. I understand my Republican colleagues will not agree to everything that I may support, but there is a common denominator that we can find.”
Murphy is the author of a book on violence in America, “The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy.” He did not claim that anything the senators would or could do is a solution to gun violence.
“But by doing something, we at least stopped sending this quiet message of endorsement to these killers whose brains are breaking, who see the highest levels of government doing nothing, shooting after shooting,” he said. “What are we doing? Why are we here?”
He took a breath, then ended where he began.
“What are we doing?”
With additional reporting by the Westport Journal.
I would add “What are we waiting for” to his comments. The time to harden our schools and be pro-active is NOW, before a tragedy strikes. Westport is not immune and insulated from insane people and the carnage they produce. Why is there a continued opposition to having a School Resource Officer in EVERY Westport school building? That plus a police vehicle visibly parked at the school each day would absolutely give even the most mentally disturbed lunatic pause and probably have him/her go elsewhere. If any town can afford this level of protection it is Westport. We’ve wasted millions on studies and physical changes to buildings which are more an annoyance to a prospective shooter than a deterrent, especially as with time passing the school administrations become less and less diligent in adhering to the protocols and security. Nothing will be as effective as a highly trained Westport police officer. The additional benefits to the school population of a SRO is also very well documented in other communities as well as now at Staples. What are we waiting for? Today there are 19 families that, unfortunately, are saying “Why didn’t we.” Is there anything more precious than our kids? Politicians aren’t going to solve this, we need to deal with this in our community on our own.
From the Washington Post: “Two Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer fired at the shooter, but it did not stop him from entering the building.”
How about this as a response. All parents in all schools throughout the United States, until the laws are changed take your children out of the schools homeschool them if necessary but do not allow them to go back to school until the laws in this country are changed
Remember “Lysistrata”.