On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders called the massacre a moment for national mourning and prayer, even as lawmakers advanced a pair of bills that would liberalize gun laws. One measure that could pass the House as early as this week would remove long-standing restrictions on silencers. The bill to allow silencers comes despite the fact that concertgoers at Sunday night’s music festival were alerted to the massacre by the sound of gunfire emerging from the high-rise hotel above them. Another bill expected to move through Congress this fall would allow people to lawfully carry concealed weapons across state lines into jurisdictions that don’t allow them. Speaking from the Senate floor, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy condemned Congress’s failure to tackle gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, in which a shooter with an assault rifle killed 20 young schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.

Sen. Chris Murphy: “The hurt is deep, the scars are wide in Newtown, but they are made wider by the fact that this body, in four-and-a-half years, has done absolutely nothing to reduce the likelihood of another mass shooting. And indeed, because we have done nothing, the mass shootings continue.”