WASHINGTON — More than 500 gun purchases have been blocked since a new gun law requiring stricter background checks for young people took effect in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday, the day after an Iowa school shooting killed a sixth-grader came.
The bipartisan law passed in June 2022 was the most sweeping gun legislation in decades and would require additional checks on gun purchases by people under 21. Those denied gun purchases include a person convicted of rape, a suspect in an attempted murder case and someone the Justice Department said was involuntarily committed for mental health treatment.
President Joe Biden welcomed the news, calling it an important milestone.
“Simply put, this legislation saves lives,” Biden said in a statement that also called for additional measures such as universal background checks and a ban on firearms often called assault weapons. The Democratic president said he was “proud to have taken more executive action than any president in history to combat gun violence in America, and I will never stop fighting to get even more done.”
The news came the day after the country was rocked by another school shooting, carried out by a 17-year-old boy armed with a shotgun and a handgun, who killed a sixth-grader and injured five others on the first day of classes of the new year . at a high school in Iowa, authorities said. The suspect, a student at the school in Perry, Iowa, died of what investigators believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It was not clear Friday how the shooter obtained the weapons, but people under 18 cannot legally buy guns in purchases regulated by federal law.
The 2022 law was passed after a series of mass shootings, including the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Texas. The measure was a compromise that also included steps to keep guns away from more perpetrators of domestic violence and to help states enact red flag laws that make it easier for authorities to take guns away from people found to be dangerous.
It mandates extra checks with state and local officials for young buyers, along with the FBI databases that are typically searched before someone is allowed to buy a gun. These steps have prevented 527 guns from being sold so far, Garland said.
Still, “this is not the time to relax our efforts,” he said in remarks that also addressed the overall decline in homicide rates in many U.S. cities. “We still have so much to do.”