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June 20, 2023By Kate Scanlon, OSV News
(OSV News) -- President Joe Biden on June 16 marked the first anniversary of a bipartisan gun safety bill he signed last year in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, calling on Congress to take additional action to address gun violence.
Biden made remarks at the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, a state that experienced a mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 students and six adults were shot and killed by a gunman. Biden signed the gun safety bill in June 2022 after a May 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
In response to the Uvalde shooting, Congress passed a gun safety bill, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The law expanded the background check system for prospective gun buyers under 21 years old, closed a provision known as the "boyfriend loophole" by banning domestic abusers from purchasing firearms regardless of their marital status, and funded new investments in mental health resources.
The bill marked the first significant federal gun safety legislation passed in nearly three decades. But Biden has called on Congress to take further action, an argument he reiterated in remarks at the summit.
"Whether we're Democrats or Republicans, we all want families to be safe," Biden said. "We all want to drop them off at the house of worship, a mall, a movie, the school door without worrying if that's the last time we’re ever going to see them. We all want our kids to have the freedom to learn to read and to write instead of learning how to duck and cover in a classroom."
"And above all, we all agree: We are not finished," he continued.
In 2022, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. Now that the House is in GOP control and Congress is divided, further legislative action on gun regulation is not likely, including on measures Biden is seeking, such as universal background checks. But even when Democrats controlled both chambers, lawmakers were only able to pass a modest bill in order to secure enough Republican votes to meet the Senate's 60-vote filibuster threshold.
Biden has issued more than two dozen executive actions on gun safety. He has called for additional measures, including universal background checks and requiring safe storage of firearms.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for action banning "assault weapons," a term commonly referring to military-style semi-automatic weapons capable of being fed by large capacity magazines that allow a shooter a consistent rate of fire before having to reload. In a 2020 document, "A Mercy and Peacebuilding Approach to Gun Violence," the bishops wrote, "We support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns."