Two House Democrats have proposed legislation that would require the U.S. attorney general to approve purchases of semiautomatic weapons before they can be received by a purchaser.
The bill from Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Corrine Brown, D-Fla., is a response to the Orlando shooting that left 50 dead, and prompted Democrats to renew their call for gun control measures. Brown represents the district in which the shooting took place.
Under their bill, firearms dealers would be prohibited from selling “a semiautomatic assault weapon or large capacity ammunition clips” until the attorney general verifies that the buyer has “truthfully answered questions” on the firearms background check questionnaire.
Those questions relate to previous contacts the buyer might have had with federal authorities. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, had been interviewed twice before by the FBI for possible ties to terrorism, but that wasn’t enough to prevent him from buying a gun.
“If this measure had been enacted previously, this violent killer in Orlando would not have been able to purchase an assault weapon,” the lawmakers said in a statement to a Houston magazine.
“Mass shootings like the ones that occurred in San Bernardino, Newtown and Orlando are made easier to carry out by the prevalence and ease in obtaining automatic assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines,” they added. “We can make it more difficult for those who would do our people and communities harm by making those weapons more difficult to obtain, or better yet, by banning them altogether.”
The bill comes amid a new Democratic push to boost gun laws in some way. Several of their Democratic colleagues are looking to move legislation that would ban people on a federal “no-fly” list from buying weapons, although Republicans say those lists are inaccurate and would deny people their Second Amendment rights without any due process.
