WASHINGTON - A young man had acquired a semiautomatic rifle and used it to massacre children, again, which meant that an onerous clock had begun ticking for Sen. Chris Murphy, again. 

The challenge was the same as ever: turn a moment of national grief and introspection into new laws that could reduce the number of lives claimed by gun violence. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, conferred with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who wanted to immediately call a vote on background-checks legislation that had passed in the House a year ago, knowing it would probably fail, to force Republicans to show Americans where they stood on the issue. Murphy says he implored Schumer to hold off, to give him time to attempt to broker a deal on legislation that might actually pass. "Give us some room," Murphy remembers saying. "We'll get a compromise." Schumer agreed to give him 10 days to try.

If Murphy wanted to get something done this time, he knew he had to move quickly. "I know how this works," he said. "I know that often the partners who show up on Day 1 are only interested so long as this is in the headlines."

The headlines were particularly gruesome this time - 19 fourth graders dead, some maimed beyond recognition, just 10 days after a different shooter killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo - which meant an avalanche of grief for the nation and, possibly, an opening for Murphy and his allies.

He was sitting in an armchair in his Capitol office, which is decorated with photos of his two young sons, including a fourth grader who had told his dad, on the drive to school that morning, that he and his friends spent the previous day making plans on where to hide if an active shooter were to enter their classroom. In the outer office, a photo of Fred Rogers greets visitors. "Look for the helpers," it says, quoting the avuncular television icon.

Murphy has spent nearly a decade looking for people around here who might help him pass new, meaningful gun-control legislation, and he never seems to find enough of them.

Could this time be different? Senators on both sides of the aisle say there is fresh optimism that they can reach an agreement that would lead to new legislation.

"I think this has happened recently enough and given us a sense of urgency that maybe we haven't had in the past," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in a phone interview Thursday.

Resistance to federal gun laws from Republicans - who tend to argue that gun control measures are ineffective and infringe on gun owners' Second Amendment rights - has long been Murphy's biggest obstacle, and Cornyn has been more open to the Democrat's overtures than many others in his party. He is head of the Republican delegation in a bipartisan group of senators, led by Murphy, that is trying to hammer out a piece of legislation both parties could agree on.

"One of the ideas that makes sense to me is to find some way to give some sort of limited, careful, confidential look back to make sure that somebody can't show up at 18 years old [and] claim to be legally qualified to purchase a firearm when, if they had been an adult with this same record, they would have been disqualified by the background check system," Cornyn told The Washington Post. "I've been spending a lot of time on the phone and Zooming and that sort of thing, and that seems to jump out as one aspect of this where people say, 'Yeah, that's a problem.'"

The Texas Republican said that he is hopeful that there might be some common ground there. "Not naive," he said, "but hopeful."

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Perhaps more than anyone else on the Hill, Murphy personifies the hope and disappointment of Americans who believe the answer to stemming mass shootings lies in tightening federal gun laws.

His quest began in 2012 after a 20-year-old resident of Newtown, Conn., shot and killed 20 kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. At the time, Murphy was a 39-year-old congressman who had just been elected to the Senate. He was young and principled and uber-ambitious, following a path to the Senate he'd charted out as a freshman in high school. He spent that December day at a firehouse in Newtown, feeling "powerless, extraneous, impotent" as he watched hundreds of frantic parents search for their children. Eventually, there were 40 parents left and no more survivors. Murphy stood outside as those parents were taken into a private room and told that their kids had been gunned down inside their first grade classroom.

Later, as the firehouse emptied out, Murphy spotted a man sitting alone. Neil Heslin had been told hours earlier that his 6-year-old son, Jesse, was among the dead, "But he didn't believe it," says Murphy. "So he decided to stay, in case Jesse came back. And I will never forget that scene. I'll never forget Neil sitting in the middle of that room refusing to believe that his son was lying on the floor of that classroom."

That holiday season became an epoch of sorrow, and Murphy discovered a new sense of purpose as he prepared to join Congress's upper chamber. Erica Lafferty, daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, can remember first encountering Murphy at an event that December. "He just looked at this room full of sobbing families and he said, 'I promise I'm not going to give up.'"

Murphy's first speech on the Senate floor in 2013 was a call to action on gun control. Over the following two years he gave speeches every week, telling colleagues about the victims of gun violence, so they'd "understand who these people were." He began to sleep and breathe gun violence, digging into the impact on communities that rarely control a news cycle. "I have come to care about the victims in Hartford and New Haven and Baltimore as much as I care about the victims in Newtown and Uvalde," he says. In 2020, he published a book called "The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy."

"If America doesn't have more men than other countries and doesn't have more mentally ill people than other nations, then what is different about us that causes this almost exclusively American epidemic?" Murphy writes in the book.

"Well, here is the simplest and perhaps most important truth," he continues. "It's just much easier to commit mass murder in America ... It's easier in general to get a gun here than anywhere else. And it's much easier to get your hands on a gun that will kill many people very quickly."

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Murphy is the type of guy who probably gets mistaken for other guys - tall and thin, with dark hair combed stick-straight. But among gun-control activists, he enjoys a vaunted status. When Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a grass roots gun-safety group, introduced him at a rally in D.C. two years ago, she says it was as if she were bringing on a rock star. "I had to tell the audience to calm down," Watts recalls. "Like, is it Tom Cruise? No. It's Chris Murphy, people. I mean, they went insane."

For all the gratitude that Murphy, who is now pushing 50, has earned among activists for his persistence, his labors on the issue have resulted in few legislative victories. The biggest success came in 2017 when Murphy and Cornyn teamed up on a measure that strengthens requirements for federal and state authorities to report criminal history records to a national background check database.

"I credit Chris with realizing that we weren't going to be able to do everything he wanted to do, but we could do this and this would be something that would be progress and, in the end, save lives," Cornyn said. "I give him a lot of credit for recognizing the hand we've all been dealt and trying to use that for good."

In general, though, Washington has been a graveyard of gun-control bills. In April 2013, four months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a bipartisan bill led by Sens. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., was defeated. In the years that followed, talks on gun reform bills - often led by Murphy - have repeatedly collapsed in the Senate. In 2016, after a man killed 49 people and injured 53 at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Murphy filibustered on the Senate floor for nearly 15 hours to force a vote on a pair of measures: expanding background checks for buyers at gun shows and online, and blocking gun sales to people on terrorism watch lists. He secured an agreement to vote on the measures. Both measures, and two counter proposals from Republicans, were voted down largely along party lines. More negotiations on background checks stalled out in 2019. Last year, an effort to expand the definition of a commercial gun dealer went nowhere after Murphy and Cornyn failed to strike a deal.

With tangible victories constantly slipping out of reach in Washington, Murphy has come to see his most important role as a someone who fans the movement's flame. "At these moments I feel like I need to convey my sense of outrage," said the senator, "so that other people realize it's OK to continue to be outraged at this." Meaningful change in gun laws will come, he said, only when voters put more pressure on his Republican colleagues than the National Rifle Association.

His signature issue has given Murphy purpose as a senator, but it has also mired him in one of America's more grief-soaked and intractable problems. On Murphy's desk, a faded paper heart is taped to the back of his computer monitor. He was given the Valentine by gun control activists two months after the massacre at Sandy Hook. In an adult's neat handwriting it says "Invest in the future." Beneath that, in a child's messy scribble, it reads, "Me."

"I never had an issue like this where I would wake up every single day with a sense of emotional mission," said Murphy, adding: "It also means I'm petrified that I'm going to end up a failure because I'm not going to succeed on this issue."

His closest friend in the Senate, Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said that is the reason Murphy never publicly shows the toll the issue takes on him. "There's an old saying among coaches. They say 'Be tired, don't look tired,'" says Schatz. "If you're in the United States Senate, you don't get to outwardly express despondence because you have a unique responsibility to maintain, on behalf of people who care about these issues, some degree of focus and optimism."

Lafferty, daughter of the Sandy Hook principal, is a gun control advocate now. Sometimes she refers to Murphy as an angel. "He's the light in my dark," she said after a rally on Capitol Hill last week. "He allows me to keep going when I can't."

But 48 hours had already passed since the most recent awful thing had happened, in Uvalde, Texas, and failure was most definitely a possibility.

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"There is a bit of a script that plays out in these tragedies," Murphy said.

Since the Uvalde news broke, he had been doing his best to recruit a promising cast and rewrite familiar scenes in the hope of giving that script a new ending.

"I'm here on this floor to beg," he beseeched his Senate colleagues in a speech that went viral in those crucial early days after the shooting, "to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues: Find a path forward here."

In the hours that followed he raced through a gantlet of television interviews. He spoke at a hastily organized gun control rally. He texted his two Texas colleagues messages of condolence, then started reaching out to other Republicans to see if any of them, having seen smiling photos of 19 schoolchildren taken before they were killed, might be in the mood to help pass some gun safety legislation.

He says the days that followed the Uvalde shooting felt different, with more Republicans reaching out to work with him, but he knows a deal is still a long shot. Murphy says he will support "anything that saves lives" including red-flag laws and background checks. A decade ago he wanted sweeping reform; now he will settle for incremental changes.

Until a new law is inked, though, optimism is just another element of a tired script.

Cornyn, for his part, set a high bar for what he would consider an ideal compromise. "I'm not interested in getting 50 Democrats and 10 Republicans," he told The Post. "I want to see substantial majorities of both political parties vote for the eventual product. That means it's hard, but I think it's certainly going to be worth the effort."

Over the course of his crusade to get gun control legislation passed, Murphy acknowledged that he has occasionally felt like Charlie Brown, attempting to kick a football only to have Lucy pull it away again and again. Still, he said, "I'm never, ever scared to run up to the football." He added: "I think there's one cartoon in which Lucy keeps the football down." Which is true, although, Charlie still missed the ball.

For Murphy, even a decent shot at connecting on a bipartisan gun bill is enough to be hopeful. Not naive, but hopeful.

"I feel like I failed a million times," he said in his office last week. "But, you know, in order to get anything done, you have to fail first."

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The Washington Post's Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.