Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeVare. I'm all for the thoughts and prayers and our hearts are with

you. And symbols matter and words matter. This is a time for action. And I completely reject this

notion that there's nothing we can do. Today's guest, Phil Murphy, who just last month

became the new governor of New Jersey.

You replaced Chris Christie, putting a Democrat in charge of what's usually thought of as a pretty solidly blue state, but had a Republican governor for eight years.

Most people were paying attention to other races last year.

Murphy was the frontrunner through the primaries and then through the general election, and it was never competitive.

So you may not have noticed that he snuck in as maybe the most liberal governor in America across the board on all sorts of issues. He's rich, made somewhere between tens of millions

and hundreds of millions at Goldman Sachs, and never ran for office before the race he won last year.

He was, as you'll hear, not too pleased when I said that there were some similarities between him and President Trump.

He did do some other things along the way, including serving as Obama's first ambassador to Germany,

where he was pretty popular, until he got caught up in the very first WikiLeaks dump, the big one,

of all those diplomatic

cables, and he had to answer for saying Angela Merkel was insecure, among other things.

Here's why I wanted to talk to him, though. As it happens, Tuesday afternoon, Murphy did a big

event talking about the gun legislation he wants to pass. Part of that included legislation

restricting magazine

size and caliber that the state legislature put out after the Newtown shooting, that was back in

2012, but that Christie had said he wouldn't sign and disagreed with. So that's Tuesday.

Wednesday, of course, was the latest school shooting massacre in Florida,

17 people dead. And like every time the debate went around about doing something and whether it was

the right time to do something or even to talk about doing something. Though this time with the

...