Democratic senator rips colleagues after Texas shooting: 'The time is now for Congress to shed its cowardly cover'

More than 20 people were killed Sunday at a Texas church after a lone gunman reportedly entered and opened fire. Details are still emerging, but the Houston Chronicle reports 28 people were killed in the attack at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, roughly 30 miles east of San Antonio. Several more were injured.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy (D) issued a scathing statement after the attack Sunday, ripping his colleagues in Congress for their lack of action on gun control. "The paralysis you feel right now — the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen — isn't real," Murphy wrote. "It's a fiction created and methodically cultivated by the gun lobby."

Murphy — who was representing Connecticut in the House of Representatives in December 2012, when 20 children were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School — called for Congress to "shed its cowardly cover and do something" about the lack of gun control in the U.S. The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale noted that in the immediate wake of Sunday's attack, the difference in responses by Democrats and Republicans was stark:

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Just last month, more than 500 people were shot and more than 50 killed in Las Vegas when a lone gunman opened fire over a concert on the Las Vegas Strip, using multiple weapons he had outfitted with "bump stocks" in order to make them fire more rapidly. Dale noted that if initial estimates of Sunday's casualties are correct and at least 25 people were killed, two of the three deadliest shootings in modern American history will have occurred in the last month.