Days after a shooting at an Oregon community college left 10 dead including the gunman, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made a new push for tougher gun control legislation.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Reid urged his colleagues Monday to pass legislation to require mandatory background checks on gun purchases.
“I’ve started to reach out to senators and talking about what can be done to advance the cause of background checks,” Reid said, renewing a push for more stringent gun laws that followed the 2012 Newtown school shooting that left 20 first-graders dead, along with 6 educators. The effort eventually stalled and fell by the wayside.
The senator listed the names of all the victims of Thursday’s shooting and reminded his colleagues that this isn’t an “isolated tragedy.” He said gun violence kills 30 people a day and that there have been 200 mass shootings in 2015 alone.
“Communities all around our nation are shattered daily by these cruel and undeserved acts of gun violence,” Reid said. “The reality of gun violence in the United States is not only shocking. It’s pathetic.”
Reid blamed a lack of action on Republicans, whom he said “wage a right-wing ideological crusade fashioned by the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.”
“To pass background checks, we need Republicans to stop acting as puppets of the NRA,” he said.
He said that ninety percent of gun owners, a majority of the members of the NRA and 86 percent of Republicans believe there should be background checks, despite the lack of action.
“Each time gun violence claims the life of an American, the nation follows the same routine,” said Reid, echoing remarks made by President Obama following the shooting in Oregon.
“Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said about the preponderance of mass shootings in recent years. “We’ve become numb to this.”
