In response to the Newtown massacre and the 2012 shooting deaths of 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, about 1,500 pieces of gun legislation were introduced in U.S.
“When the federal government failed to act, the states stepped in to fill the void” on gun-control legislation, Thompson said. The bill by Thompson, a gun owner and Second Amendment backer, would expand background checks but also would have features designed to attract support from gun-rights advocates such as banning gun ownership lists. House of Representatives, a gun-control bill by Mike Thompson, a California Democrat and the chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, has gained 186 co-signers but has been stalled for months. “So when a bad guy walks in there with a gun, he’s going to be the only one with a gun until the police can arrive,” Pratt told Reuters Television. NRA officials declined to be interviewed for this story.Įrich Pratt, a spokesman for the Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group, said both Obama’s gun-control approach and gun-free zones for schools and other sites of mass shootings are misguided. The NRA has argued that attacks like Newtown were more a result of a weak mental health system than lax firearms regulations.Ī week after the Newtown attack, NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre came out strongly against gun control and called instead for armed guards in each of the 99,000 schools in the United States. Obama also backed a proposal to ban rapid-firing “assault” weapons like the one used in Newtown and tighter limits on the capacity of ammunition clips.īut the measures failed to clear the Senate in April in the face of opposition from gun-rights advocates who say it is essential to hold the line on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment of the Constitution. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in January showed that 86 percent of those surveyed favored background checks for all gun buyers. “This issue is like a cruise ship that’s been going in the wrong direction for a long time, directly toward the iceberg, and it’s going to take a while to turn around.”ĭemocratic President Barack Obama supported legislation in Congress this year that would have extended background checks for sales made online and at gun shows. “We’re in this for the long haul,” said Mark Glaze, executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition founded by Bloomberg. In scores of statehouse battles, both gun-control and gun-rights advocates have notched wins since a mentally unstable gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.Įlectoral and legislative fights since Newtown - including the election last month of a Democratic gun-control supporter, Terry McAuliffe, as governor of Virginia, the home state of the powerful National Rifle Association gun lobby - are likely a foretaste of battles to come next year in federal and state elections. REUTERS/Connecticut Department of Justice/Handout via Reuters Weapons and ammunitions belonging to Sandy Hook Elementary school gunman Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut are seen after its recovery at the school in this police evidence photo released by the state's attorney's office November 25, 2013.
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