Watch: Sen. Chris Murphy calls Texas school shooting ‘another Sandy Hook,’ asking ‘What are we doing?’ in emotional speech on Senate floor

Speaking from the Senate floor after a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy implored his colleagues to address the uniquely American pattern of gun violence, repeatedly asking one question of his fellow lawmakers: “What are we doing?”

Hours after an 18-year-old gunman stormed Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Murphy likened the massacre to one in his home state a decade prior.

The senator — elected in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Connecticut — said the Uvalde community would never be the same again and would face the enduring and embedded trauma that has burdened Newtown in the last 10 years.

“There are 14 kids dead in an elementary school in Texas right now,” Murphy said hours before the true tally of the massacre at became clear. “What are we doing? What are we doing? Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African American patrons,” — he said in reference to the shooting in Buffalo 10 days prior — “we have another Sandy Hook on our hands.”

“Our kids are living in fear every single time they set foot in a classroom because they think they’re going to be next,” Murphy continued. “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. 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.”

The senator’s full speech can be viewed below in a video posted by C-SPAN. Click here to watch.

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