Tens of thousands of protesters on Saturday at demonstrations in hundreds of places in the United States demanded tougher gun laws after several large-scale recent shootings, including a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Protesters want Congress to tighten firearms regulation in the US after the shooting, in which an 18-year-old man shot and killed 19 schoolchildren and two adults at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Ten days earlier, an 18-year-old man shot and killed ten people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Both gunmen used semi-automatic firearms.
“If our government can’t do anything to prevent 19 children from being killed, butchered in their own school and beheaded, then it’s time to change the government,” said David Hoog, who was killed in a 2018 high school shooting. the state of Florida survived, against several tens of thousands of protesters in Washington.
Hogg is a co-founder of the “March for Our Lives,” a gun control movement formed after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were shot dead. An earlier rally by the organization that year gathered an estimated 200,000 people in Washington.
‘Enough is enough’
“Enough is enough,” Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser told the organization’s second march in the capital. She called on Congress to “do its job, and that job is to protect us, to protect our children from gun violence.”
Also read: Even after massacre at Texas school, the US is heading for more weapons
However, it is considered unlikely that far-reaching new measures in the field of firearms control will be introduced. While Democrats, including President Joe Biden, support a ban on the sale of semi-automatic firearms and stricter restrictions on who can purchase firearms, Republicans generally strongly oppose such restrictions on the right to own firearms, enshrined in the Act. Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
Republicans in the evenly divided Senate, where sixty out of a hundred votes are needed to pass a new gun law, in particular stand in the way of a breakthrough. A group of senators from both sides has been discussing possible measures since the Uvalde massacre. Topics discussed include stricter requirements for the sale of semi-automatic weapons to young people aged 18 to 21 and stricter security at schools. No deal has yet been announced.
The House of Representatives, where the Democrats are in the majority, passed a far-reaching new gun law on Wednesday with more ambitious steps. Among other things, this bans the sale of semi-automatic weapons to young people aged 18 to 21, and also bans the sale of bullet magazines with more than fifteen bullets. That law, which was passed after emotional testimony from parents of a killed student in Uvalde and an 11-year-old classmate who survived the massacre, does not stand a chance of being passed by the Senate.