Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says the Senate will make another attempt to pass gun control legislation in response to a new round of mass shootings. At least 10 people were shot to death n Baltimore, Fort Worth and Philadelphia over the weekend and July 4, while shootings in Lansing, Mi., and Wichita, Kan., left dozens more injured. The Gun Violence Archive counted 20 mass shootings across the U.S. since July 1, leaving 19 people dead and more than 100 injured. A year ago, Congress passed gun control measures in response to a wave of shootings. The prospects for significant gun control legislation remain dim, though some prominent Republicans, such as former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (TN), say the political dynamic is beginning to shift among GOP voters, reports The Hill.
“It’s clear from today’s data — especially the growing incidence of mass shooting events involving high-capacity magazines and assault weapons — that it’s time to consider policy changes,” Frist wrote in a Forbes op-ed backing an assault weapon ban and expanding background checks to all firearms purchases. Frist told The Hill that Republican voters’ views of gun control are changing. “Something is changing over the last three years compared to 20 years ago when I was here. There is a willingness to have civil discussions on what have been highly contentious issues that I didn’t see 15 years ago,” he said. Polls show that suburban voters, a critical bloc of the electorate, support tougher gun laws. A poll in May by All In Together, a nonprofit women’s civic education group, and Echelon Insights, a GOP polling firm, found that guns are the number one concern of women voters ahead of the 2024 election. Forty-two percent of independent women voters said a candidate needed to share their view on guns to get their vote, rating the issue as important as a candidate’s view on abortion and the cost of living. Christian Heyne of the Brady Campaign, a gun violence prevention organization, says, “Suburban women are not only wildly supportive of gun violence prevention policies but we’ve seen numbers that it’s a huge motivator to bring people to the polls."
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