Dems seek recess vote on guns

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate on Monday urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to call lawmakers back to Washington to vote on a gun background-check bill following deadly shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend.

The House, controlled by Democrats, passed the bills in February, but the Senate, controlled by Republicans, has not called for a vote.

Congress is on its August recess. Also, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 77, fell and broke his shoulder at home in Kentucky over the weekend.

Earlier Monday, US President Donald Trump said the nation must condemn "racism, bigotry and white supremacy" as he called for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to work together to develop strong background checks for gun-buyers.

Trump suggested linking gun-control measures with "desperately needed immigration reform" but did not outline a policy or say how that might happen in a sharply divided Congress.

In a joint statement issued Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said: "In February, the new Democratic House Majority promptly did its duty and passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which is supported by more than 90 percent of the American people and proven to save lives.

"However, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has called himself the 'grim reaper' and refuses to act on this bipartisan legislation. It is incumbent upon the Senate to come back into session to pass this legislation immediately."

Trump called the shootings "domestic terrorism" and directed the FBI to devote more investigative efforts and psychological profiling to prevent future attacks.

The FBI said it feared the high-profile attacks might prompt copycat killings and urged the public to report suspicious behavior.

The shootings took place less than 24 hours apart over the weekend at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and in an area of downtown Dayton, Ohio, filled with bars and restaurants. Both shooters used legally purchased weapons.

Twenty-two people died in the El Paso shooting, and 10 were killed in the Dayton shooting, including the gunman. More than 50 people were injured in both rampages combined.

The man charged in the El Paso shootings, Patrick Crusius, 21, has been connected to an online "manifesto" in which he complained about a "Hispanic invasion".

"Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger," Trump said. "Not the gun."

In response, US Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat seeking her party's presidential nomination, tweeted: "'Mental illness & hate pulls trigger, not the gun' is president's dodge to avoid the truth: there's mental illness & hate throughout the world, but US stands alone with rate of gun violence. When someone can kill 9 people in a minute, that gun should never have been sold. Action!"

Trump has repeatedly told voters that Democrats plan to "take your guns away" and has suggested that mass killers can be countered by more citizens carrying weapons for self-defense rather than by the outlawing of guns.

In the past, the president has vowed to veto legislation passed by Democrats in the House to broaden background checks — a stance he apparently reversed Monday.

McConnell has declined to take up bills the Democratic House majority passed earlier this year that were intended to close loopholes in federal background checks.

US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted: "Mitch McConnell should bring the Senate back into session immediately to pass HR 8 the gun safety bill that has already passed the House. That's the first step in addressing our serious gun violence epidemic."

Former vice-president Joe Biden tweeted: "We are in a battle for the soul of this nation. And in this moment, we all have a responsibility to declare with conviction that hatred and bigotry and white supremacy have no place in America. We will give hate no safe harbor."

Biden called the mass shootings "a sickness." In prior campaign statements, Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, vowed to defeat the National Rifle Association. He called for a ban on assault weapons with high-capacity magazines.

In 1994, then-president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed into law a 10-year "assault weapons ban" on firearms such as AK-47s, Uzis and TEC-9s.

A clause in the measure said it would expire unless Congress specifically reauthorized it, which Congress did not do. Both the House, Senate and White House were controlled by Republicans that year. George W. Bush was president.

Pro- and anti-gun groups contested the effectiveness of the law.

US Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, tweeted: "Let's speak truth: Gun violence is a national emergency in our country."

Speaking to reporters before attending a service at an African-American church in Las Vegas, Harris said, "We have a president of the United States who has chosen to use his words in a way that have been about selling hate and division among us."

In 2017 in Las Vegas, a man shot 58 concertgoers and injured hundreds more with a semiautomatic rifle equipped by a "bump stock" that increased the rate of fire, a device Trump moved to ban.

US Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey seeking the presidential nomination, on Monday tweeted: "The president is weak. And wrong. White supremacy is not a mental illness, and guns are a tool that white supremacists use to fulfill their hate.

"There is complicity in the president's hatred that undermines the goodness and the decency of Americans regardless of what party," Booker said. "To say nothing in a time of rising hatred, it's not enough to say that 'I'm not a hate-monger myself.' If you are not actively working against hate, calling it out, you are complicit in what is going on."

Former US congressman Beto O'Rourke, who represented El Paso, temporarily suspended his presidential campaign to fly home. He said Trump's rhetoric about illegal immigration across the southern border had incited the violence. "We've got to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we're seeing," O'Rourke told CNN.

Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama and former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, called white nationalism a "toxic brew".

In June 2018, the FBI examined shootings between 2000 and 2013 in an effort to identify "those who may be on a pathway to deadly violence" and found 94 percent of the shooters were male. In a companion study focusing on incidents in 2016 and 2017, the FBI found all shooters were male.

Most shooters were single at the time of an incident (57 percent) or divorced or separated (22 percent) and most (63 percent) were white. The FBI said 35 percent of the shooters had been convicted of a crime as an adult, and 62 percent had a history of abuse, harassment or bullying.