Colorado shooting prompts calls for gun control

Last week, as senators were planning a hearing on gun control, a string of shootings in Atlanta claimed the lives of eight people.

On Monday night, Sen. Richard Durbin was going through his opening remarks for the hearing when news broke about another mass shooting, this time at a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store. Ten people were killed.

“These victims and their loved ones are worthy of our thoughts and our prayers but there’s more that’s required,” Durbin said Tuesday during a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on The Constitution. The panel, which is led by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, is examining public health and law enforcement approaches to gun control as well as successful community-based program that address the issue.

“I could ask for a moment of silence for the mass shooting in Boulder,” said Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois. “And after that, I could ask for a moment of silence for the shooting in Atlanta six days ago. And after a minute, I could ask for a moment of silence for the 29 mass shootings that occurred this month in the United States.”

In addition to a moment of silence to honor the victims, Durbin said he is also seeking “a moment of action.”

Blumenthal laid the blame on government leaders.

“Inaction by this Congress makes us complicit,” he said. “Now’s the time for action ... real action.”

President Joe Biden is committed to passing meaningful gun control measures, Blumenthal said.

“This time feels different, the dawn of a new era completely committed to gun violence prevention,” the senator said.

But in an evenly split Senate, Democrats face an uphill battle.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz rejected Blumenthal’s assertion that Republicans in Congress are the problem. “Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater, where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” Cruz said. “The senator from Connecticut just said the folks on the other side of the aisle have no solutions. Well, the senator from Connecticut knows that is false.”

On MSNBC Monday evening, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Congress’ lack of action on gun control has become an implicit endorsement of mass shooters.

“We’re a country that sends an unintended but meaningful message to mass shooters of endorsement,” he said. “When Congress doesn’t do anything year after year, decade after decade, in the wake of mass shooting after mass shooting, these minds that are starting to become unhinged imply that it’s OK.

“And so it’s not a coincidence that over the last 100 years the two moments where Congress passed the most meaningful anti-gun violence statutes, in the 1930s and the 1990s, there was an immediate precipitous downturn in the rate of violence.

“Yes it’s because the laws changed but it’s also because the highest levels of government sent a signal that we didn’t accept this level of carnage in our country and people took that moral signal and changed their behaviors because of it.”