Joe Biden announced Tuesday a new salvo of regulatory measures supposed to limit the circulation of firearms, but recalling that it is up to Congress to impose real restrictions in the face of the shootings which punctuate the life of the country.
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“Let’s be clear. None of this relieves Congress of its responsibility,” said the American president, following presenting the latest decrees.
He called on the divided parliament, with a Democratic-held Senate but a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, to impose systematic background checks on gun purchases, remove manufacturer protections weapons in the face of the risk of complaints, and above all to ban assault rifles.
It is very unlikely that the president’s appeal will be heard: the conservatives, fervent defenders of the constitutional right to have arms, are indeed opposed to any significant legislative tightening.
Getty Images via AFP
“Do it now. That’s enough!” Yet claimed the 80-year-old Democrat, who came to the Asian community of Monterey Park, California, bereaved by a recent shooting in a dance hall.
The American president evoked the 11 victims who fell on January 21 under the bullets of a septuagenarian, taking care to personalize his evocation, at a time when the shootings, except the bloodiest, hardly go out of the ordinary statistics anymore. UNITED STATES.
He recalled, for example, the memory of a 62-year-old woman who liked to “play cards” and “share the vegetables from her garden with her neighbors and friends”.
“Contagious smile”
Or the memory of a 72-year-old man with a “contagious smile” and “died protecting his rider.”
Joe Biden was greeted when he got off the plane in Los Angeles, among others, by Brandon Tsay, who had managed to disarm the Monterey Park shooter as the latter was regarding to attack a second dance hall.
The White House previously announced new regulatory measures to marginally strengthen background checks for gun purchases.
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The executive also wants to encourage the use of reporting (“red flag”) of potentially violent individuals, whom the justice system can then deprive of firearms, and deal with the explosion in the number of weapons declared as “stolen”. » or « lost » during transport between merchants.
Joe Biden also wants to step up the pressure on the powerful gun industry. He also “encourages” the Federal Trade Agency, an independent body, to publish a report on the sale and promotion of firearms to minors.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, 8,415 people have been killed by firearms since the beginning of the year in the United States, more than half of them by suicide.
The same site recorded over the same period 110 shootings that injured or killed at least 4 people – not including the shooter.
