Dive Brief:
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During a Thursday U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on solutions to school gun violence and mass shootings, victims of the May massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and survivors of other mass shootings testified about their experiences on the day of and following these tragedies while lawmakers starkly disagreed on how to address the issue.
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Throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers spoke against gun control measures and in defense of the sale of AR-15s — a semi-automatic rifle commonly used by perpetrators in mass shootings — and attributed violent acts like mass shootings in schools to single-mother households and a lack of Judeo-Christian teachings in the classroom. "That's what it comes down to — more than fatherlessness — we have started teaching children that there is no absolute right and wrong," said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas.
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Democratic lawmakers continuously pushed for responsible gun ownership, increased age limits on gun purchases, background checks, red flag laws that hinder gun ownership for people considered dangers to themselves of others, a ban on AR-15s and improved law enforcement training.
Dive Insight:
Just one day after the 10-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, began the hearing with an audio recording of the repeated AR-15 rounds that rang in the halls of Robb Elementary School.
"In that decade — the decade that passed between these two murders of our children — no substantial gun safety legislation was ever signed into law," said Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Georgia. "We cannot afford another 10 years."
However, in line with the outcomes of many past federal discussions on the issue, the nearly five-hour hearing resulted in no substantial agreement about the root cause of the problem or its potential solutions.
Republican lawmakers said Democratic solutions would unnecessarily gut the Second Amendment and don't address what they said was the root cause of the problem. "Democrats aren't interested in searching for the causes of these horrific and tragic acts of violence, which is — as I said — is the persistence of evil in the world," said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Arizona, a ranking member of the committee. "And how do we curb that?"
Other conservative lawmakers agreed.
Gohmert cited "schools who are grooming children," a lack of Judeo-Christian teachings in K-12 schools, and "spiritually weak" children as the root cause of the problem.
"Biblical Judeo-Christian morality has gone out the window…that is the common thread that I've seen," added Gohmert.
Biggs said gun control efforts would "emasculate the Second Amendment," and that measures like background checks on all firearm transfers, red flag laws, banning semi-automatic firearms, extending background check waiting periods, and other Democrat-proposed solutions would "infringe upon the the rights of law-abiding Americans."
Democratic lawmakers stood their ground regarding those solutions.
"This is about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people — people who walk into a classroom and gun down innocent children," said Rep. Val Butler Demings, D-Florida, a former law enforcement officer.
Jackson Lee pushed for an assault weapons ban. "If we're not going to ban them, then law enforcement must be trained to confront these weapons of war," she added.
During the hearing, both political parties worried about the lack of a bipartisan agreement during this and the next Congress and blamed the continuous disagreement on the opposing party.
In 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among children between ages 1 and 19 years in the United States, trumping motor vehicle crashes, according to the National Institutes of Health. Gun-related deaths among children and adolescents increased nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, even more than the increase among the general population.
This past year saw the highest number on record of people shot on K-12 school property, at 327 fatalities and injuries in 2022.
