After a new series of gun killings, Joe Biden called in a press release on Congress to "
quickly
" pass a bill which, among other things, would set the legal age to buy an assault rifle at 21.
“
The scourge of gun violence in America demands stronger action
,” the US president said, after seven people were killed in a shooting in Half Moon Bay, California on Monday, the second in two days. to hit the Asian community in this western state.
Two draft laws
Condemning this “
senseless new act of violence
,” the 80-year-old Democrat points to two bills tabled Tuesday by three senators from his party.
One aims to outright ban the marketing of “
military-style
” assault rifles .
The other, more modest, aims to raise from 18 to 21 the legal age to buy an assault rifle in the United States.
“
I once again call on both houses of Congress to act quickly and send this assault rifle ban bill to my desk
” for ratification, writes Joe Biden.
The American president has been calling for a long time, in vain, to restore in the United States a ban on assault rifles, as it existed between 1994 and 2004, but he comes up against the opposition of the Republican Party, which arises in defender of the constitutional right to possess weapons.
Since the beginning of the year, the Conservative Party has controlled one of the houses of Congress, which makes an outright ban unlikely.
On Saturday, a 72-year-old Asian man armed with an assault rifle burst into the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California, where he fired 42 bullets and killed 11 men and women, all over the age of 50.
Read alsoHow the NRA is blocking gun control reforms in the United States
On Monday, 600 kilometers north of there, in Half Moon Bay, another individual, also of Asian origin, killed at least seven Chinese agricultural workers on two farms.
Shootings, whether in shops, places of worship, in the street, in stadiums or schools, punctuate daily life in the United States.
From now on, the number of victims must be particularly large or the circumstances particularly significant for them to arouse national media interest.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshots in 2021 in the United States, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year.
This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.