Citation

Murphy C. Law Contemp. Probl. 2017; 80(2): 233-238.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Duke University, School of Law)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

On December 14th, 2012, my political career, already fourteen years old, changed course. That morning, I was standing on a train platform in Bridgeport, Connecticut, readying to take my four year-old and one year-old boys to New York City to see the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree. I received a call that a shooting had occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There were reports of children being among the victims. A few hours later, I was at the firehouse adjacent to the school, as twenty sets of parents were told that their children lay dead on the floor of their first grade classrooms.


Sometimes in this business, you pick the issues on which you work. Other times, the issues pick you.

Before that day, fighting for laws to reduce gun violence was not at the top of my political priority list--as a Congressman, I simply did not represent any cities with epidemic levels of gun violence. But it has become my singular focus as a U.S. Senator, because in the wake of Sandy Hook, my eyes have opened to the catastrophe of gun violence in America, and the inability to explain our exceptionally high levels of gun homicide with any data points but our gun ownership rates and our lax gun laws...

Available: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss2/10

Language: en