Sen. Chris Murphy can always be counted on to say something about gun control in the aftermath of any mass killing. The man would be a one-trick pony if he just kept his idiocy to one topic. Unfortunately, he's more like a reverse polymath who is able to bring stupidity to any subject.
And he wasted no time getting back to his gun control roots after the shooting at Brown University.
Just a day after the tragedy unfolded there, Murphy took to the Sunday morning shows to not just talk gun control, but to claim that President Trump is making everyone less safe.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a leading gun reform advocate, on Sunday accused President Trump of engaging in a campaign to increase violence in the country since taking office.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” — conducted a day after a shooting at Brown University — Murphy defended his efforts to pass gun reform legislation in the past but said the president this year has walked back several measures, including the gun violence prevention grants included in a sweeping bipartisan gun reform bill in 2022.
“Laws do make a difference,” Murphy said, pointing to lower rates of gun violence and mass shootings in states with stricter gun control, such as Rhode Island.
“But this is not shocking because, over the last year, President Trump has been engaged in a dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country. He is restoring gun rights to felons and people who have lost their ability to buy guns. He eliminated the White House Office of Gun Violence Protection, and he has stopped funding mental health grants and community anti-gun violence grants that Republicans and Democrats supported in that 2022 bill,” Murphy added.
“So he has been engaged in a pretty deliberate campaign to try to make violence more likely in this country. And I think you’re, unfortunately, going to see the results of that on the streets of America,” he continued.
If that's what Trump is trying to do, he kind of sucks at it.
The homicide rates are down. Mass shootings are down, even by the Gun Violence Archive's count. Just about every "gun crime" metric is down nationally and, of course, in most cities and states as well.
And if laws actually make a difference, then why did Brown happen?
Rhode Island was never a hotbed of violent crime. It's freaking Rhode Island, for crying out loud. It's a state that avoids conflict to such an extent that its founder refused to just claim land, but bought it from the local Indians instead. It's not like it was ever inner city Los Angeles from the 1990s or Chicago today.
And the same is true of a lot of other anti-gun states with low violence. They were never violent to start with, so pretending they were is ridiculous. Plus, those "violence" rates include a healthy dose of suicides, which are a different issue entirely.
Of course, between Brown University and Australia, Murphy is on his back foot on guns. He has to shift the blame as much as he can, at least for Brown, because the whole thing undermines his entire argument that gun control works. He has to blame Trump because if not, the illusion shatters forever.
But the problem is with people.
We don't know what the motivation behind the Brown attack was, but we do know that the Australian attack was Islamic terrorism driven by the innate antisemitism of Muslim extremists, and it was a far worse killing in a more gun-controlled environment. It just shatters the entire myth, and Murphy and his bunch know it.
So, they scream as much as they can, trying to shift the blame, all in hopes that the American people won't be able to take a momen to step back and see that two and two equals four.
Let's make sure they can see it.
