HPOU President Joe Gamaldi played host to U. S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, on Sept. 26 to share thoughts about a recently passed bill that strengthens background checks for prospective gun owners.
Cornyn was the original sponsor of the so-called Fix NICS Act and garnered another 78 co-sponsors before it passed as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act recently signed by President Donald Trump.
According to Gamaldi, the meeting represented a “meet-and-greet” since it was the first time the senior senator from Texas had sat down with the newly elected Union president. Also present was immediate past HPOU President Ray Hunt and several of Cornyn’s aides, including Jay Guerrero, his Houston office manager.
Gamaldi said discussions also centered around ways of better protecting schools from active shooters.
“We told him it would be a good idea to increase training for dealing with active shooters,” the HPOU president said, “and that we would suggest having armed police officers at every shool as a way of preventing these shootings from happening.”
The Fix NICS Act aims to fix current gaps in the current federal background check database. The bill’s title refers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), was launched in 1998.
The bill is designed to:
- Establish a new “Domestic Abuse and Violence Prevention Initiative” in order to better prevent those convicted of those crimes from obtaining weapons.
- Publicly report any federal agencies that fail to upload relevant information to the system, and withhold certain pay from political appointees who neglect to upload the info.
- Establish new measures to verify the accuracy of existing records already uploaded into the system.
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