Thousands Protest in U.S. to Demand Greater Gun Control

Thousands of people took to the streets of several U.S. cities on Saturday to demonstrate in favor of stricter supervision of the sale and possession of firearms after recent massacres, including that of a school in the state of Texas that shocked the country.
“I join them in reiterating my call to Congress: do something,” U.S. President Joe Biden wrote on his Twitter account in support of scheduled protests in Washington and many other cities.

Congress needs to:
– Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
– Strengthen background checks
– Enact safe storage laws and red flag laws
– Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability
We can’t fail the American people again.
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 11, 2022

On May 24, an 18-year-old high school student killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers after breaking into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, near the Mexican border with a semi-automatic assault rifle. A few days earlier, a white supremacist of the same age had murdered ten black people in Buffalo, in the northeastern United States.
These latest massacres, and the hundreds of shootings that don’t make headlines, have sparked new calls to unite to demand better gun access legislation.
“It’s time to go back to the streets,” calls for ‘March for Our Lives’, the movement founded by victims and survivors of the massacre at the parkland, Florida (southeast) high school, which had already organized a massive demonstration in Washington in March 2018.

On Saturday, the first hundred protesters reached the huge obelisk in the US capital. One of them carried a sign with a drawing of an assault rifle with the legend “child killer” written in red.
Thousands of vases with white and orange flowers were installed on the area’s lawn, representing the increase in violence in the country since 2020, the year in which 45 million 222 people were killed with firearms, according to Giffords, the association of the origin of this memorial.
Read: ‘He was the sweetest kid I’ve ever met’: Who are the victims of the Texas shooting
“Common Sense” Laws 
“Whoever you are, walk with us,” March for Our Lives figure David Hogg wrote in a Fox News op-ed Friday.
“If we agree that killing children is unacceptable, then we must prevent these people from having guns in their hands or we have to act proactively so that they do not do so,” he added.
People “are fed up and it’s time to pressure Congress to do something,” he added.
Biden, picking up elements from an impassioned speech delivered on June 2 following the Massacre at the Uvalde School, also called on lawmakers on Saturday to “pass common-sense laws on gun safety.”
The Democratic leader again listed the reforms he expects from Congress: banning the free sale of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines; strengthen background checks, including psychological checks, of buyers; requiring civilians to keep their weapons under lock and key; encourage reporting in cases of fears of potential actions; and making arms manufacturers more accountable to the state.
“We cannot betray the American people again,” he wrote on Twitter.
Negotiations in the Senate 
Biden has repeated his pledge to take action against gun violence that successive administrations have been unable to curb.
But in a country where nearly one in three adults owns at least one gun, conservatives strongly oppose any measure they deem may go against the rights of “law-abiding citizens.”
The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to ban the sale of semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines to those under 21, among other things.
This measure has almost no chance of passing the Senate, where it needs the support of ten conservatives.
At the same time, representatives of both parties are meeting to try to find a compromise text that can muster the necessary majority.
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Original source in Spanish