Twenty American senators, Republicans and Democrats, announced on Sunday, June 12, an agreement on several provisions to better regulate the use of firearms.
These measures, which require a supermajority to be approved in the Senate, include an encouragement for states to withdraw their weapons from those deemed dangerous as well as others aimed at mental health and safety in schools, but do not include the essential to the reforms demanded by the Democrats and Joe Biden.
Insufficient but “significant” “advances”
The President of the United States, however, immediately welcomed “advanced” insufficient but “important”considering that it would be the text “most significant gun control vote to pass in Congress in decades”.
The presence of ten Republican senators among the signatories of the press release announcing this compromise suggests that such a text has a real chance of passing the Senate if all fifty elected Democrats are in favor of it. A qualified majority of sixty votes is required for such a bill to be adopted, which has so far blocked any major progress towards better regulation of the use of firearms, due to opposition from the Conservatives .
The massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas (twenty-one dead), triggered several parliamentary initiatives, including that of this group of senators, led by Democrat Chris Murphy, who has worked discreetly in recent days to find an agreement that can be approved by Congress.
Thousands of Americans in the streets
The twenty senators, ten Republicans and ten Democrats, agreed to “a common-sense bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep [les] safe schools and reduce the danger of violence across the country”, explains the joint press release. Their proposals also include stronger criminal and psychological background checks for gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21 as well as federal funding for various mental health programs.
On Saturday, thousands of Americans demonstrated to demand better control of firearms after recent killings. On May 24, an 18-year-old high school student carrying an assault rifle killed nineteen schoolchildren and two female teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, near the Mexican border. A few days earlier, an 18-year-old white supremacist had killed ten black people in Buffalo, in the northeastern United States.
