Assault weapons ban: Pelosi tees up House vote on Friday

The legislation is unlikely to pass in the Senate

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives will hold a vote on an assault weapons ban before the end of its business for the week.

The speaker announced the vote to members of her caucus in a dear colleague letter on Friday. She emphasised that it was a reinstatement of the federal Assault Weapons Ban that passed in 1994 as part of the crime bill that President Joe Biden authored when he was a senator, which Bill Clinton signed when he was president.

But the ban expired in 2004 when George W Bush was president and Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress.

In an address to the nation last month, Mr Biden called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“When we did this in the ’90s. It was hard, but it happened and it saves lives and I'm looking forward to the passage of one when I talked about it on the floor this afternoon,” Ms Pelosi said.

The vote comes after both houses of Congress passed a bipartisan gun violence bill after a shooter in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School. However, that bill did not ban assault weapons or expand background checks.

Recently, the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee’s chairwoman Carolyn Maloney of New York released a report that revealed the firearms industry collected more than $1bn in the past decade from selling “military-style” assault weapons to civilians despite the rise of gun violence in the country.

“These companies used disturbing sales tactics – including marketing deadly weapons as a way for young men to prove their manliness and selling guns to mass shooters on credit – while failing to take even basic steps to monitor the violence and destruction their products have unleased,” the report said.

Some moderate Democrats were hoping to also hold a vote on increasing police funding, but late on Wednesday members of the Congressional Black Caucus came to an agreement to ensure that the measure would also have aspects that focused on police accountability.

Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia – who is running for re-election against Republican Yesli Vega, a former police officer – sponsored the legislation on police funding.

“And so, you know, I would love to vote on it. Five months ago, four months ago, three months ago, two months ago, this week,” she told The Independent on Thursday, but said it is likely it will happen at a different time.

Ms Pelosi said she was confident that the House would pass the ban on assault weapons on Friday despite the fact that the House would need to move quickly before the week ended.