A group of more liberal Democrats in the Congress will hold a news conference Tuesday afternoon to speak about gun control measures in the Congress, saying they will "discuss the need for common-sense gun safety reforms."
The Democrats will be led by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), who was elected to the Congress in 1996 after her husband was killed and her son was partially paralyzed when a gunman shot up a commuter train on the Long Island Railroad, killing six and wounding nineteen others.
While many in her party have shunned gun control legislation in recent years, McCarthy has continued to speak out, urging approval of a plan to limit the size of gun magazines that she introduced again last year, just a few days after ex-Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot and seriously wounded in Arizona.
"The shooter should be brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," McCarthy said of last weeks shootings outside Denver. "But we as a nation should also not continue to ignore avenues to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future."
McCarthy's bill to limit the size of ammunition clips, known officially as the "Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act," has 111 supporters in the House.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who is the Senate sponsor of McCarthy's same bill, will join her at Tuesday's news conference; also scheduled to be there is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).
No new legislation will evidently be introduced on Tuesday by this group - instead they want to focus on the high-capacity gun magazine ban and other legislative priorities of those who want more gun controls on the books.
"High-capacity gun magazines are tools for murder," Lautenberg said in the wake of the Gabby Giffords shooting.
While McCarthy has 111 sponsors of her bill, Lautenberg has 10 sponsors of the same gun magazine plan in the Senate - both far short of the votes needed to move that legislation forward.
And for now, that political calculus seems unlikely to change in the aftermath of the Colorado shootings, one reason the group wants to broach the issue of gun controls at this Tuesday afternoon news event.
