After Nashville, Congress confronts limits of new gun law

A balloon with names of the victims is seen at a memorial at the entrance to The Covenant School on Wednesday, March 29, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Bipartisan gun legislation signed by President Biden in 2022 has already prevented some potentially dangerous people from owning guns. But Democrats are calling for more action after mass shootings in Nashville and elsewhere, and Congress is at a familiar impasse. (AP Photo/Wade Payne, File)

Nine months ago, President Joe Biden signed a sweeping bipartisan gun law, the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades.

“Lives will be saved,” he said at the White House.

The law has already prevented some potentially dangerous people from owning guns. Yet since that signing last summer, the tally of mass shootings in the United States has only grown. Five dead at a nightclub in Colorado. Eleven killed at a dance hall in California. And just this past week, three 9-year-olds and three adults were shot and killed at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.