The bill contains language to "ban the sale, import, manufacture or transfer of certain semi-automatic weapons" but does not call for the confiscation of any applicable firearm currently possessed by US gun owners.
The only Republicans to vote in favor were Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.); the only Democrats to vote against were Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc.).
The vote marks the first time in over 20 years that Congress has passed a measure to outlaw the transfer, sale, or possession of assault weapons. The popular style of a gun has been singled out by gun control advocates following its use in a number of recent school shootings and massacres. The last assault weapons ban in place, which was passed by Democrats under President Bill Clinton, expired in 2004.
Though the bill is doomed to almost certain failure in a split Senate, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly took to Twitter to celebrate the passage of what she described as a concession to the “demands” of what she called “the self-described 'Generation Lockdown.'”
The bill was originally set to be combined with contentious police-funding provisions but was ultimately separated following pushback from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, one of whom reportedly told CNN that Democratic leadership "sprung this deal on us in the dead of night without any hearings, committee or time for members to read the text much less debate."
In May, the House Oversight and Reform Committee opened an investigation of the gun manufacturing industry in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, in which 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed, as well as a mass shooting that claimed the lives of ten people in a Buffalo supermarket by a white supremacist bearing the notorious black sun symbol made famous by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Avoz Battalion.
At a subsequent committee panel Wednesday, Marty Daniel, the chief executive of Daniel Defense testified: “So what changed? Not the firearms. They are substantially the same as those manufactured over 100 years ago.”
Daniel’s company manufactured the weapon used in the Uvalde massacre, and he called the mass shooting in the Texas town “horrible”–but insisted the fault lay not with the “type of gun,” but with “the type of persons who are likely to commit mass shootings.”