Chris Murphy

The NRA has become financially dependent on more and more guns being sold - especially the expensive ones. In turn, the NRA has stated that its top legislative priority is to protect gun makers by advocating for legislation that benefits them.

In Connecticut, we have passed some of the strongest anti-gun-violence laws in the nation. We don't restrict anybody's Second Amendment rights.

I grew up in a pretty economically safe, physically safe household, and, you know, now my life is defined by other people's trauma and by other people's emotional experience with it, and I think I'm richer for that, frankly.

I used to play lots of sports. I used to be a good tennis player. I used to be a decent golfer.

I play in the congressional baseball game.

If you were a Democrat getting ready to run for office in the 2000s, as I was, you were told to stay clear of guns... I really regret that. I regret having listened to that advice.

I worry that there are financial ties between the Trumps and the Saudi royal family.

Russia's number-one goal is to pull apart the E.U., to pull apart NATO.

I can't throw a nickel from the Capitol without hitting a think tank that's been financed by one of the Gulf States.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.

I ran in 2006 as an opponent of the Iraq War, and I came to Congress to change overreliance on U.S. military power.

I'm generally pretty responsible and diligent, but people make mistakes.

Washington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East.

What we do in Connecticut is ban assault weapons. We ban high-capacity magazines. We have true universal background checks, and we require everybody to get a permit from their police department before they can carry a pistol.

The more we remove the need for individual members of Congress to raise private election funds, the more our representatives can focus on the things they were elected to do, and the more time they will have to cross party lines and erase the divisions that pollute our national dialogue.

Most elected officials don't want you to know about the world of political fundraising because they fear that it paints an unflattering portrait of public life.

Rarely do political contributions lead to direct quid pro quo transactions - donations for votes - and those that cross this line normally get caught.

With every new class of representatives that comes to Congress, there is a greater recognition of the perils of private financing of campaigns. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on the daily pressures faced by members of Congress, we can show the public how critical this reform is to the salvation of our democracy.

America's reputation is based on its ability to deliver the world big, Earth-changing solutions.

The gun lobby is certainly politically powerful, but it loses as many races as it wins.

Participatory democracies. Open economies. Web-based communication. All American innovations to the great conundrums of the globe.

Our nation, in a short quarter-millennium, catapulted itself to global preeminence by solving the world's greatest problems and exporting those solutions to the rest of the world.

Saudi Arabia is an important country to the United States.

The list of erratic actions from Mohammed bin Salman is long: the jailing of royal family members, the detention of the Lebanese prime minister, a nonsensical feud with Qatar, the growing internal repression of political speech, and the disastrous war in Yemen.

We have a long, proud history of making things here in Connecticut. We're home to large companies like Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, and Sikorsky, as well as their thousands of suppliers.

Ultimately, stability in Syria will come from decisions made on the ground by the Syrian people and by their immediate neighbors.

America's strength in the past has been our ability to bring family members to join other family members in the United States and to look at skills but not have it be the only determination of how you get here.

I don't require a background check to contribute to my campaign. And so there are probably lots of people with unsavory backgrounds and pasts who have given to both Democrats and Republicans.

You can just assume that better law enforcement response is going to quell the epidemic of gun violence in this country.

The skill of telemarketing does not necessarily translate into governing.

We have a cleaner system of government in this state where people run based on their ideas, not based on their ability to raise money.

I have gone from a proponent of campaign finance reform to a revolutionary during my time in public service.

I think progressives understand that we are Americans at the same time as we are global citizens. We are interested first and foremost in creating peace and prosperity here at home, but we aren't blind to the fact that injustice anywhere in the world is meaningful, important, and worth thinking about.

American values come by helping countries fight corruption to build stability. American values flow through tackling climate change and building energy independence. American values come through humanitarian assistance whereby we try to stop catastrophes from happening.

American values don't begin and end with destroyers and aircraft carriers.

I think Donald Trump believes in putting a wall around America and hoping everything turns out OK.

It's a wonderful story for the gun lobby to tell that if you just load up schools with weapons, you'll be safer. All of the evidence suggests that homes and communities that have more weapons have more gun crimes, not less.

There's zero evidence, empirical or anecdotal, that more guns leads to less gun crime.

One of the smartest investments we can make in Connecticut is in job training programs.

I think when you have so many people working for American-based think tanks and American-based defense companies, there is always going to be a bent towards proposing American-led solutions for foreign problems. People get paid big money in Washington to come up with ways that America can fix problems overseas, and they are not always right.

I think most of the Washington foreign policy establishment exists in a fantasy world when it comes to Syria. They fundamentally don't understand that Russia and Iran, from the beginning, had much more at stake in Syria than the United States did. Russia and Iran were going to do everything possible in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.

In Syria, a progressive foreign policy would have shown military restraint while pumping up our ability to gain political leverage over Syria's benefactors and providing humanitarian funding to make sure that anybody that wanted to leave Syria could.

I do not understand how people can look at the rapid spread of extremism all across the globe and not understand that it is - that it isn't coincidental to the concurrent rapid spread of a very conservative strain of Islam that is paid for out of Saudi Arabia.

More Democrats should be speaking without vetting their statements through their staff because it will feel realer.

The tweets that I send out are not written by somebody else. They're not vetted through my communications staff.

Anytime somebody loses a presidential election, there are lots of explanations.

You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.

People should remember that in the 2000s, the gun lobby got a lot passed: they got riders added to appropriations bills. They got immunity for the gun industry. They successfully managed the expiration of the assault weapons ban.

I would respectfully disagree that the right to own a military-style weapon is a God-given right. I didn't see that anywhere in the Bible that I read.

Background checks applied universally and nationally would take millions of illegal guns off the streets of our cities.