WASHINGTON — Mass shootings that left 18 people dead in Georgia and Colorado in the past week reignited a bitter debate over gun violence, with President Joe Biden calling on Congress on Tuesday to reinstate an assault weapons ban and Sen. Ted Cruz accusing Democrats of opportunism – insisting that efforts to curb gun ownership make Americans more vulnerable.
“Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater, where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” Cruz said at a Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence.
Last Tuesday, a shooter killed eight people at massage parlors in Atlanta, six of them women of Asian descent. On Monday, a gunman armed with an AR-15 and wearing body armor killed at least 10 people at a grocery story in Boulder, Colorado, including a police officer.
“We’ve been through too many of these,” Biden said at the White House. “I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps … .We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country.”
Biden called for tighter background checks, and in particular closing “the Charleston loophole” – a rule that requires gun sellers to proceed after three days even if a buyer’s background check hasn’t been completed. The man who killed nine people attending a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 had a criminal record that should have precluded him from buying the gun he used.
“That’s one of the best tools we have right now to prevent gun violence,” the president said. “I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling… . Our hearts go out for the survivors who had to flee for their lives.”
At the Senate hearing, moments earlier, Cruz accused Democrats of trying to undermine Second Amendment rights in ways that are both unconstitutional and unwise, if the goal is to reduce the number of shooting rampages.
“What happens in this committee after every mass shooting is Democrats propose taking guns away from law-abiding citizens because that is their political objective, but what they propose not only does it not reduce crime, it makes it worse,” he said. “When you disarm law-abiding citizens, you are more likely to make them victims… . If you want to stop these murders, go after the murderers.”
Other Republicans on the committee echoed the point that more guns, not fewer, would keep Americans safer, as long as felons are kept from buying firearms through a more effective background check system.
One witness who supported that side of the argument was Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a former Texas House member who survived the October 1991 Luby’s restaurant massacre in Killeen, when a gunman rammed a pickup through the plate glass window and began mowing down lunch patrons.
He killed 23 people, including Hupp’s parents.
At the time, Texas law made it illegal for her to have her handgun in her purse, so she’d left it in her car. So did law enforcement officers on break from a nearby training session.
“I absolutely believe that disarming the average citizen makes for a much more unsafe society,” she testified on Tuesday. “Your wheelchair-bound grandmother cannot protect herself from the thugs who want to take her Social Security check. If she has a weapon, now she’s on equal footing.”
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