Survivors of US mass shootings call for ban on assault rifles

Survivors of recent mass shootings in the United States and the relatives of those killed in those massacres have called for a ban on the powerful assault weapons in the country.

Hundreds of people took to the streets outside the Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon, calling on Congress to create a national ban on the assault weapons, used in two recent mass shootings in the country.

"I want you to picture my face, my husband's face, as we read our daughter's death certificate," said Kimberly Rubio, the parent of ten-year old Lexi Rubio who was killed in a shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Rubio was among the group of people who gathered outside the US Capitol.

"There is one question that should be on the forefront of their minds," she said of US lawmakers. "What if the gunman never had access to an assault weapon?"

The massacre occurred on May 24, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers with a semi-automatic rifle.

A video released Tuesday shows the gunman walking calmly into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde before he heads to two classrooms and starts shooting with a semi-automatic rifle.

"Our country has a problem, a big problem," said Abby Brosio, who survived a mass shooting in Highland Park outside Chicago in July 4.

That incident occurred when a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle, started shooting from a rooftop on an Independence Day parade. He killed seven people and wounded more than 30.

Another mass shooting came in Buffalo, New York, in mid-May, when Payton Gendron, 18, arrived at Tops Friendly Markets with ammunition and what authorities described as the "express purpose" of killing Black people. He killed ten people.

After the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden appealed to lawmakers to again ban assault rifles or at least raise the minimum age for buying them from 18 to 21.

Republican lawmakers, however, refused to go along with the president's proposal.

Congress passed a 10-year ban on assault rifles and certain high-capacity magazines in 1994. But lawmakers let it expire in 2004 without renewing the ban.

Last month, Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation passed by Congress in three decades.

The new law is the most significant federal legislation to address gun violence since the assault weapons ban of 1994.

Biden acknowledged on Monday that the law falls far short of what he and his party had advocated for to stop the alarming frequency of shootings in the US.

The President said once again he was determined to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, saying, "I'm not going to stop until we do it."

Laura Medina — whose 10-year-old cousin Exavior Lopez was killed in Uvalde — told FOX 5 on Wednesday that their work isn't over. 

"We need to fight! We need to fight for him because he can't fight for himself," Medina said. "Enough is enough There’s no opportunity to wait, we have a lot of momentum we have a lot of people very angry and very upset."

More than 45,000 people were killed by gun violence in the United States last year, up from 43,671 in 2020 and 39,581 in 2019, according to FBI data.

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