Saturday’s tragic Arizona shooting outraged members of Congress from both parties. And now congressmen are beginning to suggest legislation to make sure nothing like that will happen again. Some of that legislation will likely please conservatives, and some of it likely won’t.
It’s unclear how they will react to a plan by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy
(pictured), D-N.Y., a staunch gun control advocate, to introduce legislation as soon as Monday targeting the high-capacity ammunition the gunman used.
McCarthy ran for Congress after her husband was killed and her son seriously injured in a 1993 shooting on a Long Island, New York commuter train.
“My staff is working on looking at the different legislation fixes that we might be able to do and we might be able to introduce as early as tomorrow,” McCarthy told Politico Sunday.
McCarthy plans to consult with House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to see “if we can work something through” in the coming week. A McCarthy spokesman confirmed the bill will focus on the high-capacity ammunition clips allegedly used by the Arizona gunman, but neither he nor McCarthy specified details.
“We need to look at how this is going to work, to protect people, certainly citizens, and we have to look at what I can pass,” McCarthy tells Politico. “I don’t want to give the NRA – excuse the pun – the ammunition to come at me either.”
Rep. Robert Brady, D-Penn., told CNN he plans to offer a bill that would make it a crime for anyone to use language or symbols that could be seen as threatening or violent against a federal official, including a member of Congress.
Brady wants federal officials to have the same protections against physical threats that the president does. "The president is a federal official," Brady told CNN in a telephone interview, The Hill reports. "You can't do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator or federal judge."
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