Democratic Senators push for Assault Weapons Ban in wake of year’s mass shootings

A new bill from the Democrat side of the aisle in Washington, D.C. seeks to ban the sale, transfer, manufacture, and importation of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

The push is coming from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), together with a host of their colleagues. While freely admitting the bill would not–could not–stop every mass shooting, Feinstein said in a statement that such efforts would at least begin to remove “weapons of war” from the streets.

“We’re introducing an updated Assault Weapons Ban for one reason: so that after every mass shooting with a military-style assault weapon, the American people will know that a tool to reduce these massacres is sitting in the Senate, ready for debate and a vote,” Feinstein said. “To those who say now isn’t the time, they’re right—we should have extended the original ban 13 years ago before hundreds more Americans were murdered with these weapons of war. To my colleagues in Congress, I say do your job.”

Such mass shootings have been on the rise in recent years in the United States, including the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater that left 12 dead, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 27 dead, and last year’s Pulse Nightclub shooting that left 49 dead. In October, a mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas killed 58 people in attendance and, just last week, more than 20 people were killed at a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

“And the numbers continue to grow,” Feinstein said. “Between 1988 and 1997, 125 were killed in 18 mass shootings. The next decade, 1998 to 2007, 171 were killed in 21 mass shootings. And over the last 10 years, 2008 to 2017, 437 were killed in 50 mass shootings.”

The bill purposefully exempts more than 2,200 guns for hunting, household defense, and recreation, while also leaving untouched all those newly banned weapons already lawfully owned. What it would do, in addition to the new bans previously mentioned, is require background checks on future sales, trades or gifting of assault rifles, require “grandfathered” in weapons to be stored in secure gun storage, prohibit transfer of high-capacity magazines, and ban outright bump-fire stocks that allow semi-automatic weapons to become fully automatic.