Democratic majority in the House expected to introduce legislation to impose background checks on all gun sales

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Prominent Democrats plan on Thursday to begin ramping up calls for stronger gun control at the start of a new push to use their strengthened voice in Washington to make progress on an issue that bitterly divides America.

US senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, who represent Connecticut, where 20 children and six school staff were gunned down at Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012, will lead demands for fresh action.

And the newly empowered Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is expected to introduce sweeping legislation to impose background checks on all gun sales as one of the first priorities in the incoming Congress of 2019, in an aggressive new strategy according to a report this week in Mother Jones.

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On Thursday Murphy and Blumenthal will be joined on Capitol Hill by a number of House Democrats and a clutch of leading anti-gun violence advocacy groups, shooting survivors and the bereaved, calling for change.

The event will follow the annual national vigil for all victims of gun violence at St Mark’s episcopal church just off Pennsylvania Avenue, close to the Capitol.

Family members of victims from mass shootings in the high school at Parkland, Florida, earlier this year, the Las Vegas massacre at a country music concert last year, and other recent mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Charleston, South Carolina, and Houston, Texas.

Last month 12 people were shot dead in a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, California, just before the area was hit by the worst wildfires in state history. One victim had narrowly escaped the Las Vegas shooting, and his family angrily demanded gun control.

The issue has stalled in Washington, with negligible progress from the White House or Congress, despite pledges from Donald Trump that there would be definitive action to curb gun violence after the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, which sparked a new youth movement against gun violence.

Last week the father of one of the young children who died in the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, on 14 December 2012, near Newtown, Connecticut, filed another lawsuit against conspiracy theorists who claim he is an actor and the massacre was a hoax.

Lenny Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah was killed, is suing James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, who co-wrote a book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.

Pozner has had to move house several times to attempt to escape persistent harassment from a variety of conspiracy theorists, stating via an attorney that he has even feared for his life.

Federal law requiring background checks is limited and often not well enforced.

Even some bipartisan efforts to strengthen background checks via legislation have failed to get anywhere in the Republican controlled Congress.

The GOP still controls the Senate after the midterm elections, so bills passed by the newly Democratic majority House can be blocked.

But Democrats are feeling emboldened to lay out a strident new strategy on gun control, in the hopes of winning more Republican support and also setting out their stall ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier this week, 46 incoming House Democrats wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi, who is expected to regain the speaker’s gavel in January, demanding that gun reform be a top priority for the incoming Congress.

The New York Republican congressman Peter King has previously supported bipartisan legislation to tighten background checks, even though the bill languished in the GOP Congress, but has indicated he will support fresh legislation along similar lines.

The California Democratic congressman Mike Thompson is expected to introduce a bill. Thompson will join Murphy, Blumenthal and Connecticut congresswoman Elizabeth Esty on Thursday at the call to action on Capitol Hill, as well as advocacy groups including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Newtown Action Alliance and Giffords, the campaign group started by former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she survived a mass shooting at one of her local political events in Tucson in January, 2012.