Faced with renewed calls for stricter gun control after a mass shooting near Dallas, a Republican-led Texas House committee on Monday introduced a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, even though the bill has little effect. or no chance of actually becoming law.

The Select Committee on Community Safety voted 8 to 5, with two Republicans joined by six Democrats, to forward the bill to the full House after chants from Do protesters

S

something! echoed through the corridors of the Capitol in the nation’s largest red state. Some families whose children died in the attack on the Robb primary school in Uvalde

Texas,

last year cried after the vote.

The measure is unlikely to become law given the Republican government. Greg Abbott has previously brushed aside the idea of ​​only allowing people 21 or older to buy guns like those used in many of the country’s worst mass shootings, including the one in Texas. But even getting and approving a committee vote for the bill was unusual.

The bill had languished for weeks

before before

the weekend shooting that killed eight people at Allen Premium Outlets, a sprawling open-air mall, and getting a committee vote amounted to a U-turn of sorts for Republicans.

Republican Representative Ryan Guillen, chairman of the House Select Committee on Community Safety, said Monday he still believes there is not enough support in the legislature for the bill to ultimately pass. He voted against the measure leaving his committee, which passed the bill on what was effectively the latest possible day as time is running out before the legislative session ends later this month.

When asked why the bill suddenly came to a vote after weeks of inactivity, Guillen said nothing had changed.

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The push to raise the age has been led in the Texas Capitol for months by some of the families of the 19 children and two teachers who were killed in Uvalde when an 18-year-old gunman opened fire with an AR rifle in a fourth … class class.

Mack Segovia, whose stepdaughter, Eliahna, was killed at Robb Elementary, attended the Capitol rally Monday in a shirt with a picture of her in her softball uniform.

It happened again. And it will happen again and again, Segovia said. It happened this weekend at a mall. You are no longer safe anywhere, wherever you are… It’s going to strike again, we just don’t know where.