US Congress mulls action on gun control following mass shootings – By Kevin Bohn (Al Jazeera) / June 6, 2022
Senators report progress in bipartisan talks on potential reforms, but Republican opposition may prove insurmountable.
Washington, DC – Mark Barden has seen moments like this come and go – times when he thought the US Congress might finally pass gun reforms to thwart more mass killings.
But although none of these efforts have succeeded, Barden, who lost his seven-year-old son Daniel in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, remains optimistic that the time is near. A recent spate of mass shootings in the country, and especially the tragic killing of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, must be the catalyst for reforms, he told Al Jazeera.
“This is a very important moment,” said Barden, who cofounded the Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund to push for solutions to prevent future mass shootings. “We have to as a nation collectively encourage them, demand them, implore them to step up, do their job, because that is what they were elected to do.”
But while the Uvalde shooting and other recent tragedies have sparked new bipartisan efforts to find agreement on gun-control measures, experts say any proposal would have to be limited in scope to pass both houses of Congress. The odds of meaningful reform are thus slim.
