After Sandy Hook, Buffalo, Uvalde, voters must push Congress to act on gun legislation

Once again, Congress has been called to act on gun legislation in response to the school massacre in Texas.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer swiftly set in motion a pair of background check bills for gun buyers in response to the killing of 19 school children and two elementary school teachers in Uvalde, Texas last week. 

But Schumer also quickly acknowledged the refusal for years of Congress to pass any legislation aiming to curb a national epidemic of gun violence.

The school massacre in Texas comes after a white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York on May 14 in a racist mass shooting. The mass shooting was one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. Federal data shows a recent spike in hate crimes against Black Americans. 

The failure of a firearms background check bill comes after 20 children were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School almost a decade ago signaled the unwillingness of Congress to pass gun violence legislation. 

The Democrat implored his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby and reach across the aisle for even a modest compromise bill. But no votes are being scheduled.

"Please, please, please damn it — put yourselves in the shoes of these parents just for once,” Schumer said before the Senate.

“If the slaughter of schoolchildren can't convince Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do?” said Schumer about the powerful gun lobby.

The horrible political reality is that Congress has proven unwilling or unable to pass substantial federal legislation to curb gun violence in America.

Congress' unwillingness to act was made abundantly clear a decade ago when the Senate failed to approve a firearm background check bill after 20 children, mostly 6 and 7-years were killed when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, compromise legislation, written by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, was backed by a majority of senators. But it fell to a filibuster — blocked by most Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats, unable to overcome the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.

The same bill failed again in 2016, after a mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Congress has failed to act despite evidence of legislation and policies that have proven to reduce gun violence. 

The Rand Corp., through its Gun Policy in America initiative, said there is evidence that the following policies has reduced homicides, suicides and mass shootings:

• Studies show that Child Access Prevention legislation, also known as CAP laws, or safe storage laws, decrease self-injuries and suicides among youths in states that adopt them, and also decrease unintentional injuries and deaths. 

• Stand your ground laws should be eliminated as research shows that these laws are associated with an increase in firearm homicides, and there is moderate evidence suggesting they also drive up total homicides after their passage. "Stand your ground" laws remove the traditional obligation to avoid using deadly force in a conflict if retreat is a safe option. 

• There is mounting evidence that background checks for firearms purchased from a licensed dealer decrease homicides. 

• There is also evidence that waiting period laws decrease firearm suicides and homicides, and that laws prohibiting firearms possession by people with domestic-violence restraining orders decrease intimate partner homicides.

While more research needs to be done on mass shootings, there is already substantial evidence of specific legislation that decreases gun violence. 

Voters should reject lawmakers who lament that there are no solutions to reduce gun violence. We know this because of research that shows the result of specific policies that have curbed gun violence and the fact that the United States has far worse gun violence problems compared to other developed nations.

Politicians who throw-up their hands should be shown the door.

The problem is that Congress has failed to act. Therefore, it is up to voters to demand more from their elected officials in Washington or un-elect lawmakers who have repeatedly failed to keep the public safe.

Irv Randolph is the managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest continuously published African American newspaper in the nation and co-founder of The Randolph Report, a newsletter on politics, culture and career and professional news relevant to Black Americans.