Recent mass shootings are renewing the debate over whether restrictions such as waiting periods and bans on young adults buying semiautomatic rifles could have saved lives.
“If those had been in place, it would have made a difference,” said Paul Kramer, who led a successful 2018 effort to impose a 10-day waiting period on semiautomatic rifle purchases in Washington state, as well as a ban on young adults buying such weapons, after his son Will was gravely wounded during Ivanov's shooting spree two years earlier. “Those mass shootings would not have unfolded the way that they did, and very likely, lives would have been saved.
In Uvalde, Texas, the 18-year-old shooter who killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School had purchased two rifles in the preceding week. “Oklahoma students will be in school in two months,” said House Minority Leader Emily Virgin."If we fail to act before then, it will be because the Legislature has no will to do so. That’s something that I hope all Oklahomans are paying attention to.”minimum age for purchasing weapons from 18 to 21
Scott, now a U.S. senator,"encourages all states to look at the action he took in Florida to determine what works best for their state,” his communications director, McKinley Lewis, said in an email Friday. Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, said waiting periods are important, and it's obvious to him why more states don’t require them: Many firearm laws, he said, are"written by people who sell guns.”
Hawaii has the longest waiting period in the U.S., at 14 days. Alan Beck, an attorney representing residents who are challenging various aspects of the state’s gun laws, said the two-week period seems arbitrary. If it's meant as a cooling off period for someone who is angry, he said it won't have an effect on potential gun buyers if they already own a firearm.
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