Senate bargainers announced a bipartisan framework Sunday responding to last month’s mass shootings, a modest breakthrough offering measured gun curbs and bolstered efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs.
The proposal falls far short of tougher steps long sought by President Joe Biden and many Democrats. Even so, if the accord leads to the enactment of legislation, it would signal a turn from years of gun massacres that have yielded little but stalemate in Congress.
Leaders hope to push any agreement into law quickly — they hope this month — before the political momentum fades that has been stirred by the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
The compromise would make the juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks. The suspects who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde were both 18, and many of the attackers who have committed mass shootings in recent years have been young.
The agreement would offer money to states to implement “red flag” laws that make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, and to bolster school safety and mental health programs.
And it would take other steps, including requiring more people who sell guns obtain federal dealers’ licenses, which means they would have to conduct background checks of purchasers.
Biden said in a statement that the framework “does not do everything that I think is needed, but it reflects important steps in the right direction, and would be the most significant gun safety legislation to pass Congress in decades.”
Given the bipartisan support, “there are no excuses for delay, and no reason why it should not quickly move through the Senate and the House,” he said.
(AP)
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4 Responses
Not enough.
This pro guns vs pro life fight comes up every few years and almost nothing comes of it. Happy to hear that congress might finally take the pro life majority of voters seriously, even if it means angering the pro gun lobby.
So a person who is a danger to the rest of us can buy an assault weapon, but he has to keep his/her appointments with a shrink. That’ll work?
If someone has been determined, after a judicial hearing with due process, to be dangerous, then they should be locked up. If the danger is not great enough to deprive a person of his liberty, then it’s not great enough to justify depriving him of his right to be armed. And certainly it is unthinkable to do so without due process, let alone without any notice at all, just on someone’s say-so. What other fundamental right would be taken under such circumstances.