Democratic lawmakers have reintroduced a bill that would establish a national gun sales database and require universal, fingerprint-based background checks for gun buyers.

Rep. Bobby Rush and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats from Illinois, reintroduced the bill Thursday in their respective chambers. It was previously introduced in the House in 2007, 2009, 2013 and 2018, but has never made it out of committee.

The measure, dubbed the Blair Holt Firearms Licensing and Record of Sale Act, is named for a Chicago high school student who died while protecting a friend when a gunman opened fire on a public transit bus in 2007.

It has almost no chance of progressing in the Republican-held Senate.

"The students of the nation are crying out for common sense gun control laws to help protect them in their schools, homes, and playgrounds," Rush said in a statement . "We cannot continue to fail them by allowing our streets to be flooded by untold numbers of unaccounted for handguns, assault weapons, and other firearms."

The bill would also prohibit unlicensed firearm ownership and the transfer of guns without a license.

Rush and Duckworth argue that such a measure would have prevented a mass shooting at a manufacturing warehouse in Aurora, Illinois in February, in which a just-fired employee killed five of his colleagues and wounded several police officers.

Police said the man should not have been allowed to own a gun because of a prior felony conviction. The state is now facing lawsuits alleging it wrongfully approved a firearm owner's identification card for the gunman that allowed him to buy the weapon he used in the attack.

