Chris Murphy had barely taken his seat at the head of the table when he was hit with a little history. “That’s Bobby Kennedy touring the Delta, and later he toured Appalachia,” Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner on the front lines of the opioid epidemic in North Carolina, said as the senator looked down at the photo. Those trips in 1967 and 1968, Nolan said, sparked a “conversion,” awakening Kennedy to the crisis of poverty in America. “I hope your tour,” he told Murphy, “is as rich.”
It was a cool day in early August. Murphy—wearing striped socks, dark jeans, and a slate sport coat—seemed slightly uncomfortable with the comparison. He looked up to Kennedy. But he was not surveying shotgun shacks in Mississippi; he was sitting in an unassuming community center conference room on the outskirts of Boone, North Carolina, a college town about 100 miles northwest of Charlotte and a short drive from the Tennessee border. “I don’t think I could ever hold a candle to the work that he and others were doing,” he told me afterward. But for an ambitious New England Democrat in Appalachia, perhaps it was difficult to avoid the parallel. What, exactly, was the junior senator from Connecticut—best known for the decade-long gun safety crusade he launched after the Sandy Hook shooting—doing at this roundtable 400 miles from Washington and 700 from his home state, asking questions about opioids, struggling factory towns, loneliness, and the ills of social media?
“There are just real practical impacts to people feeling lonely and disconnected,” Murphy told the crowd of community leaders. “Political instability and polarization is driven by people feeling upset and angry when they can’t find positive connection and they go find it in darker, more dangerous places. But I think as I get older, and I get deeper into this job, I just have come to the conclusion that it’s not good enough for me just to kind of adjust the dials of public policy, and as a policymaker I have to step back and ask questions about how people are feeling.”
“You can’t spend 10 years thinking about violence in America without trying to grapple with the underlying emotional state of a country in which people shoot first and think later.”
If you know Murphy, it’s probably as Capitol Hill’s conscience amid this country’s never-ending plague of gun violence. The guy giving impassioned Senate floor speeches calling on his colleagues to offer more than “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the latest mass shooting. The guy who, after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre last year, pulled off what might count as a political miracle in this era of profound polarization: the passage of a bipartisan gun safety bill, the most significant such legislation in three decades.