Pelosi: House Will Consider ‘Assault-Weapons’ Ban Next Week
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that the House will consider legislation to ban “assault weapons” next week.
The Democrat-controlled House is already set to vote on “red flag” legislation next week, while the House Judiciary Committee is meeting Thursday to mark up eight more bills aiming to combat gun violence, including proposals to ban high-capacity magazines and raise the age for purchasing some semi-automatic rifles.
Pelosi told attendees at an anti-gun violence event in San Francisco on Wednesday that House Democrats will also consider legislation that would aim to better warn the public of active shooter situations “like an Amber Alert.”
“And then, as we get through those, we will be having a hearing and marking up the assault-weapon ban,” she added. “So we just are trying to hit it every possible way.”
However, it is not clear if the “assault-weapons” ban would get a vote of the full House given that most Republicans and even some moderate Democrats would oppose such a measure.
The bill is highly unlikely to pass in the evenly divided Senate, where the measure would require the support of every Democrat and a handful of Republicans to meet the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster.
“Of course we want the Senate to pass the background check legislation, which will save more lives than any of the initiatives we have,” Pelosi said Wednesday.
Even if an “assault-weapons” ban were passed, it would likely be struck down by the courts. The Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that any “categorical ban” of weapons “commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes today” would violate the Second Amendment.
The House passed background check legislation last year that later stalled in the evenly-divided Senate.
A bipartisan group of senators has been meeting to negotiate on potential gun reform legislation, though the measures they are discussing are less restrictive than many of those seen in the House.
Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) is leading the talks, which have focused on several proposals including expanded background checks, enhanced school security, and red-flag laws that allow the confiscation of firearms from those deemed dangerous, the Associated Press reported.
The talks come after Salvador Ramos, 18, opened fire in a fourth-grade classroom in Uvalde, Texas last week with a legally purchased AR-15.
The term “assault weapon” is often applied to the AR-15, which has been used in a series of recent high-profile mass shootings. However, the AR-15 is semi-automatic, firing one round for each pull of the trigger, while most military-issued rifles have fully automatic capability.
Before Ramos turned 18, he tried to have his sister purchase a gun for him in September 2021, though she “flatly refused,” according to Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw.
He legally purchased two rifles in the days following his 18th birthday, the Houston Chronicle reported. One day after his 18th birthday, he purchased one of the rifles from a federally licensed gun store, which would have required a background check, according to the report. He purchased 375 rounds of ammunition one day later and a second rifle on May 20.
The suspect in another recent massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., that left 10 people dead had passed a background check before legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle from a gun store in Endicott, N.Y., which he then illegally modified to hold a larger magazine, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Canada on Monday introduced legislation that would ban the sale, purchase, importation, or transfer of handguns in the country and would require most owners of “military-style assault weapons” to turn in their firearms to a government buyback program.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article falsely said a massacre at a Buffalo grocery store left 13 people dead. In fact, the shooting left 10 people dead and three others wounded.
