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 But their chances of success are at best considered slim. Similar
legislation failed a Senate vote two years ago after 20 children
were shot to death in the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut.
“I’m here today to speak up on behalf of the Charleston community
and all who are sick and tired of Congress ignoring the problem of
gun violence," said Andre Duncan, whose aunt Myra Thompson was slain
in the Charleston church on June 17.
Duncan urged Congress to close loopholes in the so-called Brady law,
which requires licensed firearms sellers to check whether a buyer is
prohibited from owning a gun because of a criminal history.
The Brady law, passed in 1993, was named after named after President
Ronald Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, who was shot and
wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt on the president.
 “I will not rest until our legislators do what's right by expanding
Brady background checks at gun shows and online sales. This will
save lives," Duncan declared in the visitors' center of the U.S.
Capitol, standing alongside friends and family of the Charleston
victims and of other casualties of gun violence.
The shooting deaths of nine black Charleston church members last
month sparked an intense dialogue over the legacy of slavery and its
symbols, after photos surfaced of Dylann Roof, a white man charged
in the shooting. They showed him posing with the Confederate battle
flag on a website that displayed a racist manifesto.
But there has been little outcry for Congress to pass more gun
control legislation. "It hasn't been the loudest cry,"
Representative Mike Thompson, a Democratic co-sponsor of legislation
to expand Brady background checks, said at Wednesday's event.
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The bill was introduced in March. The measure also was introduced in
the last Congress but failed to get a hearing, and a similar measure
failed a Senate vote in 2013.
The current bill has four Republican co-sponsors, but none attended
Wednesday's event.
Opponents of enhanced background checks, including the influential
National Rifle Association, say it would not stop criminals from
getting guns, because criminals would just steal them or have
someone else buy guns for them.
But Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun
Violence, said he was tired of cynics who say that if Congress could
not act after the Connecticut school shooting, lawmakers will not be
able to act now.
Gross said that since the Connecticut school massacre, six states
had passed laws expanding Brady background checks to all gun sales,
"and it's time for Congress to catch up."
(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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