The United States Senate on Thursday night (23) made progress against the gun violence epidemic, imposing some restrictions on the sale of guns and allocating funds for mental health and school safety.
The law, which will be passed by the House of Representatives on Friday, does not meet the demands of gun critics and President Joe Biden, but is considered a step forward after nearly 30 years of inaction in Congress.
In a statement released shortly after the Senate vote, Biden said, “This bipartisan law will help protect Americans.” Said. “Children in schools and communities will be safer thanks to him.”
The bipartisan bill, backed by all 50 Democrats and 15 Republican senators, includes better background checks for buyers under the age of 21, $11 billion in mental health funds, and $2 billion in school safety programs.
It also allocates funds to encourage states to enforce “warning” laws to remove firearms from people deemed a threat.
It also closes the so-called “boyfriend hole” where domestic abusers can avoid a firearm purchase ban if they’re not married or living with the victim.
“The United States Senate is tonight doing something many thought impossible until a few weeks ago: We are passing the first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years,” said Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“The gun safety law we pass tonight can be described by three adjectives: bilateral, common sense, lifesaver.”
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said the law would make America safer without “making our country less free.”
“This is a pack of common sense. Its provisions are very, very popular. It includes zero new restrictions, zero new cooldowns, zero authorizations, and zero bans of any kind for law-abiding gun owners.”
The influential National Rifle Association (NRA) and many Republicans in both houses of Congress oppose it, but the initiative has support from groups working on policing, domestic violence and mental illness.
‘historic day’
The law is the work of Democratic and Republican senators, who spent weeks working out the details and resolving disagreements.
Lawmakers sought to quickly end negotiations to build on the momentum created by the killings of 19 children in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, both last month.
“Today is a historic day,” celebrated Senator Chris Murphy, who led the talks on behalf of the Democrats.
“This will be the most important law against gun violence that Congress has passed in three decades,” he told the plenary.
The last major federal gun control law was passed in 1994: it established a national background check system and banned the manufacture of high-capacity assault rifles and ammunition magazines for civilian use.
But that law expired ten years later, and despite the rise in firearm violence since then, there has been no serious reform movement.
Biden has made more ambitious initiatives, such as banning rifles and high-capacity magazines used in the attacks in Texas and New York.
But passing legislation in a Senate split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans is a political challenge as most bills need 60 votes to pass.
The green light from the Senate came as a consolation to gun control activists, hours after a Supreme Court decision establishing that Americans have the right to bear firearms in public.
The decision overturned a century-old New York law that required anyone seeking permission to carry firearms outside the home must prove need.
source: Noticias
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