Members of the US Marshals fugitive task force walk down a street near Columbiana Centre mall in Columbia, SC, after a shooting on April 16, 2022. SEAN RAYFORD AP WASHINGTON - The US House of RepresentativesHouse of Representatives passed a gun package that was unlikely to be approved by the evenly divided Senate.
The package dubbed the Protecting Our Kids Act was passed in a 223 -- 204 vote, largely along party lines.
The legislation would raise the minimum age for buying a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21 years old and ban bump stocks for civilians.
Senators from both sides of the aisle have been involved in gun legislation talks to reach a consensus on narrower gun legislation.
The move on Capitol Hill came as the United States is reeling from a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead last month.
Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student at Robb Elementary School who survived the shooting, told US lawmakers on Wednesday she smeared herself in her friend's blood and played dead.
He shot my friend next to me, and I thought he was going to come back to the room, Cerrillo, 11, said of the shooter in a recorded video to a House panel. I grabbed the blood, and put it all over me. She wanted to have security when she went to school, where she no longer feels safe.
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A rash of mass shootings in the United States over the past few weeks has renewed national attention to gun violence.
The US has suffered 251 mass shootings in the past five months, with more than 18,900 deaths due to gun violence, according to the latest data from the Gun Violence Archive.