Republicans accused Democrats of giving the government the power to arbitrarily prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional right to own a firearm based on a secretive “terrorist watch list” with no judicial oversight. Of the 109,000 individuals on the lists, Collins said the vast majority are foreign nationals. And it includes an appeals process for those who think they should be allowed to purchase a gun.
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“The reason that that bill didn’t succeed is because about 95 percent of Republicans flunked the test, and that’s the reason that the bill didn’t pass”, Earnest said.
Collins said Republican leaders have pledged to give her bill a vote as soon as this week.
The White House accused USA senators of “cowardice” on Tuesday (June 21, 2016) and said they failed the American people by not advancing any gun control measures after the nation’s largest mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, last week.
“We’ll review the Collins bill carefully but believe they would need to move the due process review up front in order to get broad-based support for the bill”, Hoeven said in a statement.
Collins was joined Tuesday by a mix of co-sponsors known for crossing party lines in the Senate.
Many Senate Republicans have been pushing for a measure that would force the Federal Bureau of Investigation to get a court order when officials wanted to stop a suspected terrorist from buying a gun.
Republicans supporting her included Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsay Graham of SC.
Collin’s bill would also alert authorities of a gun purchase by someone who was on a terror watch list within the last five years, such as Orlando shooter Omar Mateen.
On the Senate floor, Feinstein argued Collins’ proposal was “not enough to close the loophole that creates this terror gap and allows terrorists to buy guns”.
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The latest proposal comes a little more than a week after a shooting at an Orlando nightclub that left 49 people dead and 53 injured at the hands of a gunman who claimed allegiance to ISIS. Under Toomey’s plan, the attorney general would create a new list of people barred from buying firearms and a judge would have to determine if there is probable cause for each person to be on the list. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that would prevent people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that while he supports Second Amendment rights, “every right has boundaries”. “We can fix the problem with the innocent person”. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) are reaching across the aisle to draft a new bipartisan bill that would make it illegal to sell guns to people on the United States government’s no-fly list.
