Democrats end House sit-in over gun control

House Assistant Minority Leader James Clyburn of S.C., Rep.Al Green, D-Texas, Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 23, 2016, after House Democrats ended their sit in protest on the House floor.

Republicans seem no closer to taking a vote on the bill.

“We have the votes, we have the passion across the country”, Bonamici said in her address on the House floor.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, criticized the sit-in and said it was a setback to her efforts to build bipartisan support for her legislation that would ban gun sales to people on a list of possible terrorists. Democrats took a fearless stand, and ethics charges can’t diminish the message that the American people want common sense gun reform.

Throughout the night, they heard from Democratic lawmakers who were staging a daylong sit-in on the House floor.

Congress has not passed major gun control legislation since 1994, with gun rights defenders saying such measures infringe the constitutional right to bear arms.

With a crowd cheering them on from outside the Capitol and many more following the theatrics on social media, Democrats declared success in dramatizing the argument for action to stem gun violence.

Besides, he said, “the takeaway shouldn’t be the act itself and what happened over the last 24 hours, as much as the hope that what was said and what was done will have some effect in the larger society”. He says, while there are no official plans yet, the Democrats are working on what comes next.

Dozens of Democrats disrupted the chamber’s proceedings after Republican House speaker Paul Ryan refused to allow votes on two bills demanded by Democrats.

“Why people would use the pulpit of the House floor of the House chamber to advance their political agenda, to advance their fund-raising-go out to their political web sites and see how many of them have sent out an e-mail over the past week exploiting a political tragedy for their political purposes?”

Lewis, a hero of the civil-rights movement who studied at Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, vowed Democrats would continue to press for a vote on the bills when the House reconvenes next month.

News outlets and social media quickly began buzzing about the events unfolding on the House floor – the exact response needed to tug at the public’s conscience and elicit change, Lafayette said.

Democrats ended the sit-in with the civil rights icon, and leader of the Democrat protest, Rep. John Lewis, who participated in 1960 in the civil rights sit-ins in the Southern states.

Fueled by Chinese food and pizzas, the Democrats took turns occupying the chamber after raucous scenes that almost erupted into a fistfight with the majority Republicans.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted down four gun control measures Monday that were widely expected to fail.