The US Senate gave the green light to a bill to control the carrying of weapons

First modification: 06/24/2022 – 05:40

By 65 votes against 33. This was the result in the US Senate, which late on Thursday approved a bipartisan bill on armed violence, something that seemed unthinkable a month ago.

US senators introduced the bill, which greenlights a limited package of new gun restrictions as well as spending billions of dollars in funding for mental health and school safety.

“Tonight, the United States Senate is doing something that many thought was impossible even a few weeks ago: We are passing the first significant gun safety bill in nearly 30 years,” said Majority Leader Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer after the legislation passed.

Reform

As it is, the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, backed by all 50 Democratic senators and 15 other Republicans, consists of enhanced background checks for buyers under 21, $11 billion in funding for mental health and $2 billion for programs school safety.

In the same line of prevention, it would allocate funds to promote the implementation of “red flag” laws by the states, which would have the purpose of withdrawing firearms from people considered a threat.

This Friday it is likely that what was agreed in the Senate will also be validated by the House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority. Although what is deliberated by the US Upper House is far from meeting the expectations of those who are committed to greater control of weapons in the country and of the president himself, Joe Biden, it is seen as a clear advance in the matter after nearly 30 years of inaction by the Legislative.

“This is not a cure-all for all the ways gun violence affects our nation,” said Schumer, whose party has made gun control a goal for decades. “But it is a long-awaited step in the right direction.”

For his part, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that “the American people want their constitutional rights to be protected and their children to be safe at school”, in a nod to the famous Second Amendment of the Constitution, that approves the carrying of weapons. Likewise, he added that “they want both things at the same time, and that is just what the bill that the Senate has will have achieved.”

bittersweet day

Although the bill was able to move forward after weeks of closed-door meetings, it does not contemplate the strictest extremes such as the prohibition of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, used among other mass shootings, in the recent Buffalo massacres. , in New York, and in the elementary school of Uvalde, in Texas, where 19 minors died.

However, the reforms proposed in the bill serve to reinforce the positions and narrative of both the Democrats and the Republicans ahead of the mid-term elections, which will take place on November 8, where the party of Biden aspires to keep his majorities and the Republican Party to take them away.

Despite the advances in the Senate, which are expected to be confirmed on Friday in the Lower House, this Thursday’s day was bittersweet for the defenders of arms control in the United States.

In the morning hours, the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, issued a ruling that extends the right of US citizens to bear arms in public, after overturning a century-old law in the state of New York that required demonstrating the need to carry a gun away from home before obtaining a license to do so.

Republican leader McConnell welcomed both the Supreme Court justices’ decision and the Senate’s passage of the gun bill as “complementary victories that will make our country freer and safer at the same time.”

With information from AP and local media