Sen. Sherrod Brown on Sunday called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to call lawmakers back to Washington, D.C., to pass new gun control legislation after mass shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio left at least 29 people dead and dozens of others injured.

“The response I had, in addition to sadness, is anger that Congress still doesn’t do its job,” Mr. Brown, Ohio Democrat, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“The House of Representatives has passed background check legislation,” he said. “The Senate could meet tomorrow. I hope that Senator McConnell would bring the Senate back tomorrow and pass the background check bill and send it to the president. And the president must sign it, period.”

Earlier this year, the Democrat-led House passed legislation to require gun-purchase background checks on virtually all gun sales.

Both the House and the GOP-controlled Senate are on recess, and lawmakers aren’t due back in Washington until September.

“We could pass the background check bill in an afternoon, and people can get back on a plane and go back to their homes and their children and grandchildren and whatever else they’re doing in August in the evening,” Mr. Brown said. “We could do it that fast.”

In a separate interview, he said Congress should re-institute a ban on certain kinds of semiautomatic, military-style firearms.

Mr. Brown said the man accused of killing at least nine people in Dayton, Ohio early Sunday “had enough ammunition to kill potentially 100 or 200 people.”

“And that’s why you ban the assault weapon,” he said. “It didn’t stop every mass shooting, it didn’t stop every murder, but a lot of people are alive today because we’ve had background checks in some places and a lot of people are alive today because we had an assault [weapon] ban.”

Congress passed a ban on “assault”-style weapons in 1994 that lapsed in 2004.

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