Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats met on Tuesday to discuss treating gun violence as a public health crisis, with the aim of building on last year’s federal gun safety legislation. Committee chairman Dick Durbin described gun violence as a “public health epidemic” in his opening remarks. However, Senate Republicans disagreed with this framing, arguing that it would violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on mental health. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the top Republican on the committee, stated that law-abiding citizens with firearms do not pose a threat to public safety. The Democratic witnesses, including doctors and public health experts, were chosen to help lawmakers decide how to expand on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most comprehensive federal gun safety legislation passed in nearly 30 years.
Passing any additional gun safety legislation will be challenging, as Republicans control the House and Democrats only have a slim majority in the Senate. A bipartisan safety act was enacted after two devastating incidents: 19 children and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 Black people were killed in a white supremacist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. This year has witnessed several high-profile mass shootings, including one in Nashville, Tennessee, where three children and three teachers were killed, and another in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were killed and 13 were injured.
You may also like to watch : Who Is Kamala Harris? Biography - Parents - Husband - Sister - Career - Indian - Jamaican Heritage
Gun violence in the United States is a unique problem, according to Durbin, who emphasized the need for congressional action. There have been 619 mass shootings this year alone, making firearm-related injuries the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. Witnesses called by Democrats, such as Megan L. Ranney, the dean of the Yale School of Public Health, stressed the importance of collecting data on gun violence to better understand the risks and develop effective violence prevention programs.
Republicans, on the other hand, argued that gun violence and mass shootings are connected to mental health. Franklin Cosey-Gay, the director of the Violence Recovery Program at UChicago Medicine, highlighted the significance of hospital-based violence intervention programs in addressing the gun violence epidemic. Several Republicans criticized an executive order from New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham that declared gun violence a public health emergency. They claimed that this was an attack on the Second Amendment and hindered the development of reasonable policies.
