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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

By any standard, Chris Murphy is a very successful politician, a state legislator, state senator, congressman, and the United States senator, all before he turned 40.

But it was in one horrific moment in 2012 when 20 children and six teachers and staff were killed in a gun massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Murphy's Congressional District that he found his defining mission.

I spoke with him last week to talk about the improbable passage of a bipartisan gun safety law he helped forge last month after another school massacre in Uvalde, Texas.

Neither of us knew as we talked that a few days later another gunman would open fire at the July 4th parade in Highland Park, Illinois near my hometown of Chicago.

I had friends who were there and shared their anguish just another horrific chapter in the ongoing saga of gun violence in America.

Here's my conversation with Senator Murphy.

Senator Chris Murphy, it is really great to see you. I welcome, first of all.

Thank you for having me.

I want to say that I want to thank you for proving me wrong.

The night of the Uvalde nightmare, the massacre there, I was asked on CNN whether I thought the Congress would do anything.

And I said, I would like to say yes, but I didn't believe that it would because history was not very kind in this regard.

So you proved me wrong and I'm so grateful that you proved me wrong. It's important for the country.

And in so many different ways. And I want to talk about that. But I just before we get there, before we get there, I just want to talk a little bit about your own history because in a sense how you got to that moment is really important.

But you had a very kind of conventional upbringing, comfortable, suburban sort of thing.

And you were probably if they voted in your school, you were probably voted the most likely to become a politician, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was, you know, I was class president. I was on every, you know, students organization governing board you could be on.

And there was a profile written of me right after I got elected to the Senate that claimed I carried a briefcase with me in high school.

And it was just a high school friend playing a trick. But it was plausible, right? I would have been the kind of kid who would have carried a briefcase.

And so the reporter believed it and put it in the story. I was an organizer from the womb, right? I just, I was the kid who organized the touch football games.

I was the kid who organized the student protests against the renovations that are high school that were going to slowly sigh, you became addicted to this stuff at an early age.

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