Media

Democrats said their long-pledged push to tighten the country’s gun laws would take center stage early this year as lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday aimed at expanding background checks to nearly all gun sales.

Eight years to the day that former Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot at a constituent meeting in Tuscon, Arizona, House Democrats unveiled a universal background check bill they hope to pass within the first 100 days of the new Congress.

On the eighth anniversary of the shooting of former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats Tuesday announced a bill to expand background checks for sales and transfers of firearms.

The legislation marks one of Pelosi’s first acts since retaking the role of House Speaker after Democrats took back control of the lower chamber of Congress in the midterm elections. Many Democrats promised swift action on gun control during last year’s campaign season.

The Democratic shift on gun rights has moved at light speed when compared with other political shifts.

In 2007, when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) first claimed the speaker’s gavel, her majority was built from several dozen Democrats from rural areas who courted the endorsement of the National Rifle Association — and whose ranks swelled a couple of years later to give Democrats the largest congressional majorities of this century.

NBC Nightly News reported on the “stark warning from the CDC” that fentanyl “has surpassed heroin as the deadliest drug in America for the first time ever.” NBC’s Katie Beck: “The potent opioid [was] responsible for more than 18,000 deaths in 2016, and 29 percent of all overdose deaths – up from four percent in 2011. In each year from 2013 to 2016, the rate of fentanyl overdose deaths rose 113 percent per year.”

On behalf of our five-million members, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) applauds the introduction of H.R. 38, The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2019.