A Democratic senator who was a champion of gun reforms in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in his state blamed Donald Trump on Sunday for encouraging a “dizzying” campaign of violence, hours after authorities announced that a person of interest was apprehended for a mass shooting at Brown University.
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that the president’s rhetoric and actions since returning to the White House made violence “more likely” in America.
Representing the state in the Senate since 2013, the senator is a leading voice for gun safety restrictions among members of his party.
His remarks came after America was rocked by news Saturday evening of a gunman opening fire in an academic building at the Ivy League university in Rhode Island, killing two people and wounding nine others.
“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,” Murphy said.
Of the Brown shooting, he said: “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 2022].”
The White House issued a furious statement in response.
“Before spreading these lies, Chris Murphy should take a look in the mirror,” Trump’s deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson wrote. “Chris and his colleagues have regularly used rhetoric meant to incite their followers to violence, including smearing ICE officers as Nazis and calling their political opponents fascists.”
She said assaults against ICE officers “have skyrocketed” and pointed to the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, “not to mention the other violent riots that leftists have engaged in.”
“The Violent Left is a problem whether Chris admits it or not,” she told Politico.
The Independent has requested further comment.
This year saw a reduction in instances of mass casualty incidents involving firearms after those numbers spiked over 2018 and 2019, according to a database created by the Associated Press and USA Today tracking mass shootings reports.
There were at least 154 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, killing at least 49 people and causing at least 135 injuries, according to gun violence prevention group Everytown.
There have been a number of high-profile mass shootings this year across the United States, however, and on Sunday morning Americans awoke to the news of another tragedy unfolding in Sydney, Australia, after gunmen killed more than a dozen people and injured at least 29 others at a Jewish gathering on Bondi Beach.
