On Friday, the US Congress passed to applause a bipartisan law aimed at regulating gun ownership, the most important in nearly 30 years, but still much smaller than President Joe Biden had hoped for in a country plagued by gunfire.
Following its passage in the Senate on Thursday, the House of Representatives approved legislation that includes a package of measures that introduce new gun restrictions and allocate billions of dollars in funding for mental health and school safety.
This text was the fruit of an initiative that followed the massacre of 21 people, including 19 children shot dead by a young man who stormed their school in Yuvaldi, Texas, in late May, and the Buffalo massacre in New York State, where In mid-May, 10 blacks were killed in a supermarket.
Specifically, the law provides support for state-by-state laws that allow authorities to seize firearms from every person deemed dangerous.
The text also requires criminal and psychiatric records to be verified for every teenager between the ages of 18 and 21 who wishes to purchase a firearm as well as fund mental health programs.
But the proposed measures fall far short of what Biden wants, such as a ban on assault rifles.
After a series of bloody shootings, this text became the first of its kind in recent decades.
And in a deeply divided America, agreement between Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress is rare, especially on this contentious issue.
New York law requires there to be a legitimate need or “appropriate reason” to obtain a permit to carry a handgun in public.
Thus, for the first time, the new resolution clearly affirmed that Americans have the right to bear arms outside the home.
And on Thursday, in response to the passage of the Gun Control Act, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised the House of Representatives for “doing what weeks ago was thought impossible: we passed the first gun safety bill in 30 years.”
Fellow Republican Mitch McConnell calculated that the law would make the United States safer “without making our country any less free.”
As soon as the text was made public, the US National Rifle Association, a powerful association for the protection of the right to bear arms, expressed its disagreement with it, arguing that it could be used to “restrict the purchase of legal weapons.”
