Next week the House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill, which provides for raising the minimum age for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons to 21 years from the current 18
Relatives of victims of recent massacres in New York and Texas, as well as a fourth-grader who survived last week’s attack, will speak before two congressional committees. US lawmakers are considering new measures for him reduction of violence by firearms.
The mother of one of ten people killed in a supermarket in New York Buffalo as well as the parents of one of the 19 children killed in the Rob Elementary School attack in Uwalde, Texas, will speak to the House Audit and Reform Committee on June 8. Mia Serilo, a student who survived the massacre in Texas, will also address the committee.
For his part, the former inspector of the Buffalo fire department, the Garnell Whitfieldt, whose mother Ruth was killed in the attack on the Tops Friendly Markets supermarket will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 7.
The meetings of the two committees take place after two horrific incidents of mass shootings in the USA, the country with the highest number of deaths from firearms among the rich states.
A May 24 attack on an elementary school in Uwalde killed 19 students and two teachers by firing on an 18-year-old gunman before police killed him. Two weeks earlier, 10 African-Americans were killed in Buffalo by another 18-year-old white supremacist who had been arrested.
There have been other mass shootings with victims since then, including one at a Tulsa clinic in Oklahoma and an Iowa church this week.
The Democrat President Joe Biden In a televised address Thursday, he called for sweeping reforms to gun ownership legislation and called on Congress to act.
When asked yesterday Friday if he would go to Capitol to put pressure on MPs, Biden he replied that his associates were informing him of the conversations they had with those Members of Parliament and senators who were willing to discuss the matter.
He added: “I will do my best to try to see if we have made any real progress».
Next week The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill passed by the Justice Committee this week that would raise the minimum age for the semi-automatic weapons market to 21 from the current 18. No Republican on the committee voted in favor of the bill, which would ban large-capacity magazines for civilian use and crack down on illegal arms sales.
Any bill passed by the House of Representatives will then have to be approved by the Senate, where it will have to be voted on by 60 senators. That means at least 10 Republicans will have to side with the 48 Democrats and the two independent senators. Polls show that most Americans are in favor of tightening gun laws.
Withdrawal from the election race
Meanwhile, a Republican lawmaker who advocated tougher gun control after the recent massacre withdrew from the race for re-election on Friday amid criticism from his party for changing his stance.
THE Chris Jacobs An MP from Buffalo, New York, has decided to withdraw from the race to avoid “an extremely divisive election battle” for Republicans.
Jacobs called for Democrats to tighten gun control, telling Buffalo News that the Buffalo supermarket and elementary school carnage “were events that had a profound effect on me.”
The reaction was immediate. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
Jacobs was elected two years ago with the support of the powerful NRA arms lobby.
