The bill passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 217 to 213. Its approval by the Senate is now required.
The US Congress on Friday approved a bill on first reading to ban assault rifles, the semi-automatic weapons used in several massacres that shocked the US.
The text, which was supported by Democratic President Joe Biden, was adopted by the House of Representatives with 217 votes in favor against 213 against.
But it seems doomed not to pass the Senate.
Because of supermajority rules in the US upper house, it would take ten Republican senators to support the text in addition to the 50 Democrats to ban assault rifles.
This prospect seems completely unlikely, given the partisan divide on the issue of guns: yesterday Friday, only two Republicans spoke in favor of the text in the lower House.
However, in 1994, a law was passed in the US Congress that banned assault rifles and certain types of high-capacity magazines for ten years.
It expired in 2004 and since then sales of these guns, promoted by the industries that make them as “sporting” items, have taken off. During the last ten years, the industries of these weapons had a turnover exceeding one billion dollars, according to a parliamentary report.
Massacres with AR-15 rifles at a Texas school (21 victims), at a supermarket frequented by African-Americans (10 victims) and at a student national day parade (7 victims) have recently sparked new calls for a ban.
After the bloodbath at Uvalde Elementary School by a disturbed eighteen-year-old high school student, Joe Biden called on Congress a minima to raise the age limit for the legal purchase of such rifles to 21.
Yesterday Friday, the White House reaffirmed its support for the measure that will “save lives.”
“40,000 Americans die each year from bullets, and firearms have become the number one cause of death for children in the US,” he said in a statement.
As of this stage, Republicans oppose this measure, which they see as a violation of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees, as they interpret it, the right to bear arms.
Under pressure, they agreed only to back a very modest law that allows the confiscation of guns from people involved in domestic violence and increases mental health and school safety checks.
RES-EMP
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