Rep. Jackson Lee will seek meeting with NRA about response to Colo. shootings

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said late Monday that she would seek a meeting with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to see if there are any ways to find an agreement on how to prevent tragedies like the one last week in Colorado, where one shooter killed 12 and wounded nearly 60 others in a movie theater.

“I’m going to invite the National Rifle Association to one of my meetings,” she said on the House floor late Monday. “I want to sit down and talk to them about how we can work together.”

{mosads}Jackson Lee said she hoped to understand whether the NRA could agree to new rules that would require retailers to notify authorities whenever one customer is buying excessive amounts of weapons or ammo, a reference to the Colorado shooter, who is now known to have bought thousands of rounds in preparation for the shooting.

“I want an explanation on why someone can buy 6,000 rounds of ammunition on an Internet without any oversight whatsoever,” she said. “Why is there no basis of giving notice?

“If they’d given notice to the local police, maybe someone would have knocked on the door and found out what was going on,” she said. “We can find a way to come together. This is not rocket science to determine why you’re getting 6,000 rounds.”

Jackson Lee also defended some parents for bringing young children into a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie. The youngest to die was a six-year old girl, which raised some questions about what parents were doing with children in the theater so late.

“I understand that,” Jackson Lee said. “I was a young mother with my spouse in an area where we moved away from our family, it’s hard to find babysitters, and so you take a sleeping baby to the movies. There’s no sin in that.”