The people of Newtown, Conn. have everything they need right now, according to Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., but what about six weeks from now when the cameras are gone?
“Right now the community has everything it needs,” Murphy, the the Senator Elect who will replace Sen. Joe Liebermann in January, said on Morning Joe. “But the question of what happens 3, 4, 5 weeks from now.”
The country needs to “make sure we don’t have happened what happened after Aurora and other tragedies, where we stopped this conversation.”
In July, suspect James Holmes opened fire in a Colorado movie theater, killing 12 people and injured 59, but Tom Brokow noted "it wasn't part of the presidential conversation at all."
Murphy said many Newtown residents appealed to him to use his office to put a stop to shootings. “I can’t tell you the number of people who grabbed my arm as I was walking out and said 'don’t let this happen again.'”
Newtown is still grieving, but Murphy said he can already see the beginning of progress.
“You’re beginning to see people take the charge that the president left us with on Sunday evening,” he said. “I know that guns are probably the most immediately relevant—this guy got out a hundred rounds while only having to change his cartridge two times because he was using 30 round clips—but we’re also going to need to have a conversation about the culture of violence that leads someone to do this and the inability for families to grapple with increasingly complex mental illness.”