(WASHINGTON, D.C., 6/16/2022) — The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest umbrella for Muslim American organizations, supports the bipartisan framework for gun-control legislation reached Sunday by U.S. Senate. While it lacks critically necessary controls on gun buying – an assault weapons ban, expanded background checks, extreme-risk preventions, and age-eligibility increases for purchase – it is the first movement on any gun control laws in America in 28 years.
“This bipartisan agreement is not going to miraculously halt U.S. gun violence,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO Secretary-General, “but it is significant because it finally dislodges a three-decades-old, immovable political impediment to any gun control at all.”
The agreement comes with the support of 10 Republicans, giving it the 60-vote supermajority needed to vault perennial U.S. Senate roadblocks and land on President Joseph Biden’s desk for signing directly into legislation (barring any tampering).
The measure notably includes federal resources for states and Native American tribes to implement “red-flag” laws that let family members and police petition courts to temporarily bar a person considered a danger to self or others from buying a gun. Some 19 states already have such laws, and the new legislation will likely grow that number. The framework should have included this as an outright federal law – and hopefully will in the future – but this helps in the interim.
The proposed legislation also didn’t raise from 18 to 21 the legal gun-buying age, but it does include an “investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement” for 18 to 20-year-old gun buyers. Each of the shooters in the Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and Parkland, Florida killing sprees were under 21 and purchased assault rifles.
The congressional agreement does expand the federal ban on domestic abusers from buying guns, narrowing the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” Currently, only abusers who are or were married to, cohabiting with, or who have had a child with a partner are barred. The new legislation would include in this “those who have or have had a continuing relationship of a romantic or intimate nature.”
The framework also seeks to prevent legally purchased guns from reaching illegal owners – people who buy guns for the ineligible, gun traffickers, or dealers who side-step licensing requirements.
Finally, the proposal increases federal support for programs of community and school mental health, suicide prevention, and safety training.
The plan’s searing flaw is that it doesn’t include a ban on semiautomatic assault weapon manufacture, transfer, and possession, along with high-capacity ammunition feeder devices. Many Americans have forgotten that such a ban existed from 1994 to 2015 when it expired. Fully 43 of our 50 states still allow for these semiautomatic assault weapon dealings. This needs to go.
Legislators also missed a golden opportunity to expand background-check time from only 3 days to 10. If authorities don’t complete a check on time, the gun sale goes through regardless. That’s how the Charleston, South Carolina Black church mass murderer got his assault weapon that he killed 9 with in 2015.
The plan also fails to require background-check legislation on certain internet and gun show gun sales, a major deficiency.
USCMO leaders strongly support this bipartisan legislation, however, as an important first step. It gets gun control legislation moving again in America when all hope of this seemed lost. The plan does add important measures to begin to stem the tide of rampant gun availability in the U.S.
But primarily, USCMO backs this federal action in the face of 117 days of mass shootings already in 2022 out of 164 days so far this year. In 22 weeks, Americans endured a staggering 246 mass shooting incidents (four or more shot or killed). That’s about 11 mass shootings by guns every single week. In the first weekend of June alone, the U.S. had 11 mass shootings, with 36 people shot in just three incidents.
This trend is up from 692 U.S. mass shootings in 2021, which increased from 610 in 2020, and 417 in 2019. Gun killings and violence have become nothing less than catastrophic for our nation.
USCMO and the American Muslim community strongly support gun control legislation, and we call on U.S. political leadership and scholars at every level to delve deeper into the root causes of growing gun violence in our nation, something that is not and cannot be detached from the stoking of racism and religious vilification by opportunist politicians and hate activists, and the militarization of police and law enforcement at home.
We must end this culture of American gun violence.
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