Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the lead negotiator on the 2022 bill, says he thinks it represented a paradigm shift in how Congress considers gun legislation. “Is that acceptable in America?”ĭemocratic Sen. “Our classrooms have become killing fields," he said. In contrast, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said Congress should “act with the fierce urgency of now.” He said Americans need to think deeply about mental illness and other factors that drive people to act. In the House, the new GOP majority favors fewer restrictions on guns, not more.Īsked Thursday about a way ahead, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said legislation alone cannot solve the gun violence problem. John Cornyn, has said new compromise is unlikely. One of the top Republican negotiators on the gun law, Texas Sen. Now, in the wake of the Nashville shooting, Congress appears to have returned to a familiar impasse. Because the law was a political compromise, it did not address many Democratic priorities for gun control, including universal background checks or the ban on “assault weapons” for which Biden repeatedly has called. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children and schools.īut the persistence of mass shootings in the United States highlights the limits of congressional action. Several months in, the law has had some success: Stepped-up FBI background checks have blocked gun sales for 119 buyers under the age of 21, prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers and new gun trafficking penalties have been charged in at least 30 cases around the country. “There’s a moral price to pay for inaction.”īiden and others had hailed last year's bipartisan gun bill - approved in the weeks after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas - as a new way forward. “What in God’s name are we doing?” he asked in a speech Tuesday, calling for a ban on so-called assault weapons like those that were used to kill at The Covenant School in Nashville. And just this past week, three 9-year-olds and three adults were shot and killed at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.Ī day after that school shooting, Biden’s tone was markedly less optimistic than it was the signing ceremony. Eleven killed at a dance hall in California. Yet since that signing last summer, the tally of mass shootings in the United States has only grown. The law has already prevented some potentially dangerous people from owning guns. “Lives will be saved,” he said at the White House. Ban weapons of war: assault weapons and large capacity magazines, which have no place in the hands of private citizens.WASHINGTON – Nine months ago, President Joe Biden signed a sweeping bipartisan gun law, the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades.38, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act that would force states to honor the concealed carry weapons permits of every other state, regardless of how lax the other state's law. 3668, the SHARE Act that would gut long-standing regulations on silencers and loosen restrictions on armor piercing bullets. Tell Congress #Enough. Sign this petition to tell Members of Congress to: The House is close to passing a bill making it easier for people to carry concealed weapons to any state in the nation with not so much as a background check. Right now Congress is considering deregulating silencers which would make it harder to identify from where gunshots are coming in active shooter situations. There is no other kind of attack on Americans that is met with this level of indifference. Legislators beholden to the gun lobby will no doubt say now is not the time to talk about gun laws. But sympathy will not save the 33,000 Americans who will be killed this year by gun violence. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the hundreds of people that were killed or injured at the Mandalay Bay Casino mass shooting in Las Vegas, the worst in the nation's history.
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