Mexican Senators call on US Congress to pass gun control legislation

Mexican Senator Marcela Guerra on Tuesday called on the US Congress to analyze initiatives to control the sale of weapons following the US city of Las Vegas massacre that left 59 dead and over 500 injured Sunday night.


"The rise in violence in the United States is associated to the sale of weapons and the inclusion of hate speech," said Guerra, president of the Senate's North American Foreign Relations Committee.

In sending her condolences to the families of those who lost their lives, Guerra called the event "the most lethal attack in the memory of that country."

She added that the Mexican Senate also "expressed its deepest concern at the proliferation of weapons and arsenals, which are in the possession of an undetermined number of subjects ready to use them against society."

For Guerra, US legislators should begin "a serious and urgent debate on all the initiatives within that country's Congress on the control and sales of weapons."

Senator Dolores Padierna added that the problem should not only lie with the individuals who become mass murderers but on the enormous US weapons market and the ease with which the public can buy them.

She admitted that the weapons trade "represents a problem for our country, but over 80 percent of the weaponry used by criminal groups in Mexico come from the United States and the increase in the stocking of arms also has a correlation in the increase of murdered men and women."
 [globaltimes.cn/Xinhua]
 4/10/17