One of the bills is known by the authors as the Disarm Hate Act and was introduced last year in both the House and Senate. That piece of legislation hasn’t seen any movement since being introduced. The bill would prohibit someone convicted of a hate crime, or who has received an enhanced sentence because it was a hate crime, from purchasing a gun.
Julia Weber with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence told KCRA 3 that “history” and “research” indicated prohibitions should extend to people convicted of a hate crime at the federal level.
“The relationship between acts of hate, white supremacy, misogyny, ethnic bias, is pretty clear,” Weber said. “The research shows that when people maintain certain ideologies and choose to act on those ideologies, with access to firearms, the outcomes can be incredibly lethal and dangerous for the broader community.”
California and other states have already passed a similar bill.
Weber said the Disarm Hate Bill should be signed into law at the federal level to have consistency across the country. She said without consistency someone can go across state lines and purchase a weapon they may not have been able to purchase in California, for example.
“The majority of states do not have this kind of legislation,” Weber said. “So there’s inconsistency, and that’s one of the biggest problems in the United States is the lack of consistency so that somebody can go across state lines and purchase a firearm, for example, that would be otherwise inaccessible in the state in which they’re living. And as a result, we see inconsistency in application, which makes it very difficult to prevent the kinds of atrocities that we’re seeing across the country.”
Enacting gun control legislation could be tough for Democrats because the Senate is split 50-50, and there needs to be support from at least 10 Republicans to overcome a filibuster.