After second US mass shooting in a week, calls grow for gun control

Tighter gun control laws are overwhelmingly popular with Americans – and backed by Joe Biden – but Republicans have long stood against any infringement on the right to bear arms

‘Action is needed now to prevent this scourge from continuing to ravage our communities’, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement

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Police guard people evacuated from the site of a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday. Photo: Michael Ciaglo/USA Today Network via Reuters

Published: 11:26pm, 23 Mar 2021Updated: 1:34am, 24 Mar 2021

America was reeling on Tuesday from its second deadly mass shooting in a week, after a gunman killed 10 in a Colorado supermarket, sparking urgent new calls for political action on the fraught issue of gun control.

Tighter gun control laws are overwhelmingly popular with Americans – and backed by President Joe Biden – but Republicans have long stood against what a minority view as any infringement on their right to bear arms.

With a Senate Judiciary hearing on the subject already scheduled for Tuesday the familiar bipartisan divide was emerging once more, one day after a middle-aged gunman shot and killed 10 people as they bought snacks and groceries in the Colorado city of Boulder – and just a week after a 21-year-old man shot and killed eight people, six of them Asian women, at several spas in Georgia’s state capital, Atlanta.

“For the second time in a week, our nation is being confronted by the epidemic of gun violence. Too many families in too many places are being forced to endure this unfathomable pain and anguish,” the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement. “Action is needed now to prevent this scourge from continuing to ravage our communities.”

Her call was echoed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a gunshot wound to the head during a 2011 assassination attempt and has advocated for arms control ever since. “It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s beyond time for our leaders to take action,” she tweeted.

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