Murphy gives fiery Senate speech following Mich. school shooting

U.S. Sen Chris Murphy chastised his Republican colleagues over the issues of gun violence and abortion in a fiery speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, accusing them of lecturing about the “sanctity of life” on the same day that a gunman rampaged through a Michigan high school.

A clip of Murphy’s speech quickly garnered millions of views after it was posted to social media. After learning of the latest mass shooting, Murphy said that he “turned the car around” on his way home to deliver the speech.

“I listened to my Republican colleagues come down here one after another today and talk about the sanctity of life, at the very moment that moms and dads in Michigan were being told that their kids weren't coming home because they were shot at school due to a country that has accepted gun violence due to Republicans’ fealty to the gun lobby,” Murphy, a Democrat, said in the speech.

“Do not lecture us about the sanctity, the importance of life, when 100 people every day are losing their lives to guns, when kids go to school fearful that they won't return home because a classmate will turn a gun on them,” he said.

Murphy, a staunch advocate for tougher gun-control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, used the speech to renew his call for the U.S. Senate to pass universal background checks and ban military-style assault weapons.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group based in Newtown, responded to Murphy's viral speech on Wednesday by pointing out that the group supported efforts by Murphy and Republicans to pass a 2017 law requiring states and federal agencies to share more records with the National Instant Criminal

Background Check System.

“Senator Murphy knows that the firearm industry has been at the forefront of improving laws to improve background checks for firearm sales,” the group's spokesman, Mark Olivia, said in a statement. “His accusations that the firearm industry, and the senators that protect the Second Amendment rights of lawabiding Americans, hasn’t worked to make our communities safer from the illegal possession and use of firearm is hollow.”

Murphy’s speech came hours after a teenage gunman reportedly armed with a pistol purchased by his father on Black Friday killed four students and injured eight others at Oxford High School in Michigan.

The senator gave a similar speech in 2018, saying Congress failed to take action on gun control while the deadly mass-shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida unfolded in real time. That speech prompted criticism from some Republicans and opponents of gun control, who called for more time to process the shooting.

Olivia gave a similar critique on Wednesday, saying that Murphy had spoken “without knowing the basic information of this horrendous incident.”

Speaking to a reporter on Wednesday, Murphy fired back at the NSSF following their criticism of his speech.

“The gun industry is in the business of selling more weapons, they’re not in the business of securing our schools,” Murphy said.

Murphy said that he was driving to his home in Washington the previous evening after presiding over the Senate for an hour in which Republicans were giving speeches against abortion. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit against a restrictive Mississippi abortion law.

After leaving the Senate on Tuesday evening, Murphy said he heard news reports about the shooting and “became furious,” thinking about the antiabortion speeches he had heard and decided to return to the Senate floor.

Murphy