Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the federal prosecutions for gun crimes will be increased in the Justice Department as a response to the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that left 17 people dead on Wednesday.
During an interview with Breitbart News, Sessions stated that federal prosecutions have already increased by 23 percent under his leadership, and said that number will still rise.
“We’ll step that up even more,” Sessions said. “I believe very strongly in enforcing gun laws. I believe there’s no value in having them on the books if they’re not prosecuted,” he added.
However, the idea of implementing new gun laws was dismissed by the attorney general. Sessions’ solution for preventing future attacks involves working with mental health and law enforcement professionals to develop new policies.
“We think that would include working with the mental health community, and the education community, and the homeland security community,” he told Breitbart.
Former President Barack Obama together with his fellow Democrats again called for tougher gun control, following Wednesday’s shooting at a high school in Florida.
The Hill reports that they were joined on Twitter by survivors of the attack, who called on GOP lawmakers to act.
President Donald Trump on Thursday said that he would “tackle the difficult issue of mental health,” while no comments were given on the debate over gun control. Meanwhile, former CIA director John Brennan called for Congress to do something on gun laws.
“Having worked international counterterrorism for much of my career, it is imperative that we devote equal energy and effort to addressing the scourge of gun violence in our country,” Brennan tweeted late Thursday adding that “Congress needs to act now to prevent access to semiautomatic weapons that kill innocents.”
This is the deadliest U.S. school shooting since 2012, when 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Since Trump has taken office, a series of shootings shook the nation, with the worst such incident in U.S. history being when last year 58 people were killed in Las Vegas after a man opened fire on people attending a concert.
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