(PatrioticPost.com)- New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker said over the weekend that he was “not that hopeful” that Congress would be able to pass meaningful legislation on gun reform, despite the fact that there were two more mass shootings in the last few weeks.
Booker is one of the leaders of the push for gun reform legislation in the Democratic Party. Speaking on “Meet the Press” on NBC over the weekend, the senator and one-time presidential candidate said there’s a lot of “common sense” reforms that Congress could end up passing that would address violence in the country.
However, he labeled the United States as a whole as too “out of step” to do anything to stop the crisis. Booker added that America is prone in a very unique way to mass gun violence because it takes a lax approach to major reforms.
He explained:
“Everything we’re talking about today does not happen in other countries. Just here, because we tolerate it. And that’s the question: How much endurance do we have for horror and wretchedness and pain and death when we have the ability to change it?”
Booker’s interview came in the wake of an 18-year-old killing 19 children as well as two teachers after breaching an elementary school in Texas last week. The suspect — who was eventually killed by law enforcement — purchased a rifle that was like an AR-15 only days before the mass shooting. He purchased the gun legally.
Following the shooting, activists for gun control once again renewed their calls to create stricter gun laws. On the whole, though, Republicans have pushed back against taking action. Their point is that there are other issues at play for why these mass shootings are happening — mainly security at schools and mental health issues across the country.
With such a big divide between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of gun reform, a bipartisan group in the Senate came together for the first time last week to see if there was any legislation that the two sides could end up agreeing on.
The problem, though, according to Booker, is that it takes quite a long time for Congress to pass laws, especially big reform legislation that has major detractors. As an example, Booker pointed to the federal anti-lynching law that was passed just this past March, even though it was proposed for the first time nearly 100 years ago.
Despite this fact, Booker said Congress had to act quickly if they wanted to end up saving lives. He said on “Meet the Press”:
“To save our children’s lives, we have to have people get off the sidelines and into the arena.”
Will anything come of what Booker said or out of the group of bipartisan senators? Who knows at this point, but it’s very likely that if anything does come out of it, it likely won’t be as far as liberals want to go on gun control — and it’ll likely take quite a long time to pass.
