“God willing, he will save many lives,” Biden said when he finished signing the bill.
The legislation met after the recent mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that was located in a predominantly black neighborhood. A bipartisan group of negotiators set to work in the Senate and introduced the legislative text on Tuesday. The bill, entitled Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, was passed by Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democratic Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
The House on Friday passed the bill for 234-193, including 14 Republicans who voted with Democrats. The Senate passed the bill in a nightly vote Thursday.
The package represents the most important new federal legislation to address armed violence since the 1994 10-year assault weapons ban expired, although it does not ban any weapons and is a far cry from what Biden and his party had defended, and polls show. most Americans want to see.
It includes $ 750 million to help states implement and execute crisis intervention programs. The money can be used to implement and manage red-flag programs, which through court orders can temporarily prevent people in crisis from accessing firearms, and for other crisis intervention programs such as mental health courts, drug courts and veterans courts. This bill closes a years-long crack in the domestic violence law – the “boyfriend’s crack” – that prohibits individuals who have been convicted of domestic violence offenses against their spouses, couples with whom they shared children or couples with whom they cohabited to have weapons. The old statutes did not include intimate couples who could not live together, be married, or share children.
Now the law will ban having a gun on anyone who is convicted of a felony of domestic violence against someone with a “continued serious relationship of a romantic or intimate nature.” The law is not retroactive. However, it will allow those convicted of domestic violence offenses to restore their gun rights after five years if they have not committed other crimes.
The bill encourages states to include youth records in the National Instant Criminal Record Check System with grants, as well as to implement a new protocol to check these records.
The bill prosecutes people who sell weapons as primary sources of income, but who have previously avoided registering as federally licensed firearms dealers. It also increases funding for mental health and school safety programs.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
CNN’s Clare Foran, Kristin Wilson, Annie Grayer, Viane’s Ariane, Lauren Fox, Ali Zaslav, Melanie Zanona, and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.