House bill would increase gun background check period
Democrats push for more gun control. Reaction from Antonia Okafor Cover, spokesperson for Gun Owners Of America.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Thursday vowed that the Senate would vote on the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, which passed the House Thursday in a 227-203 vote.
A prior version of the H.R. 8 bill, which would require background checks for all U.S. firearm purchases, passed the House in 2019 but did not receive 60 votes in the Senate to clear the filibuster.
“In the past, when they sent it over to us last time, it went into [fomer Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard,” Schumer said during a press conference Thursday. “The legislative graveyard is over. H.R. 8 will be on the floor of the Senate, and we will see where everybody stands. No more hopes and prayers, thoughts and prayers. A vote is what we need, a vote, not thoughts and prayers.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., and 131 cosponsors reintroduced H.R. 8 on March 2.
“Certainly hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of people walking the streets today because we passed [the 1994 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act] would be dead,” Schumer, who authored the Brady Act requiring background checks on all U.S. firearm buyers, said during the briefing.
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He continued: “But when we passed the law, little did we know, it had some loopholes in it that we didn’t know at the time. We didn’t know there would be an internet, so we didn’t prohibit internet sales without a background check.”
The provision popularly known as the “Charleston loophole” after the 2015 Emanuel AME Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, gives federal firearms licensees the option to proceed with a firearm transfer if a background check is not completed within three business days.
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The shooter in the 2015 massacre, a white supremacist named Dylann Roof, obtained his firearm as a result of the provision. H.R. 8 would address the rule by expanding background check rules before an FFL may transfer a firearm to a person who is not a licensee.
The NRA Institute for Legislative action calls the provision a “necessary component of our current background check system” while more progressive organizations like the Center for American Progress say it allows unstable Americans to “evade the law and buy guns.”
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Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called the NRA “a shell of itself” during Thursday’s briefing in which he discussed the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 children.
The Biden administration on Monday said it “looks forward” to working with Congress to strengthen the federal gun background check system and to implement “commonsense” steps to reduce gun violence, urging the House to pass two measures that would “close existing loopholes” in the system.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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