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Tourists and nature lovers in California will see more than 330,000 acres set aside for a new monument at Berryessa Snow Mountain.
The area is one of three planned national monuments announced Friday by the White House that together will add protection for mammoth bones, prehistoric rock carvings and more than a million acres of wilderness in northern California, Nevada and Texas.
WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), vice-chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force today introduced the Safer Communities Act of 2015 (H.R. 2994), legislation aimed at reducing and preventing gun violence by keeping guns away from people who should not have them.
Relatives and friends of the victims of last month's shooting in a Charleston, South Carolina church traveled to Washington on Wednesday to demand that US lawmakers vote on legislation to expand background checks on gun sales.
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.
Democrats are renewing efforts to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill after a string of recent mass shootings.
The Safer Communities Act, introduced Thursday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would temporarily prohibit people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from purchasing or possessing a gun.
The legislation also takes steps to strengthen the nation's mental health system.
President Barack Obama is designating the Berryessa Snow Mountain area as a national monument, permanently protecting the rolling mountainous region that runs through Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Solano and Yolo counties.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday that he has created a "Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument" that includes parts of eastern Napa County.
The White House revealed Obama's intentions on Thursday in a press release embargoed until early Friday morning Eastern time. The release called the area "a biodiversity hot spot."
President Obama used his own authority on Friday to make it official: A vast and varied expanse stretching from just northeast of Napa, into Mendocino County, will become the Berryessa-Snow Mountain National Monument.
The designation, under the 1906 Antiquities Act, could create California's biggest national monument–slightly edging out the recently-designated San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in Southern California. Initial announcements carried conflicting versions of the monument's size, from just under 331,000 acres to nearly 360,000.
Family members of several people who were killed by gun violence in America — including the recent shooting at a South Carolina church — clutched photos of loved ones as they stood next to top Democrats as part of a call for stricter gun control measures on Wednesday.
Andre Duncan, who lost his aunt, Myra Thompson, in the Charleston shooting last month said he believes the tragedy "made Charleston much stronger than it ever was".
Thompson was killed June 17 along with eight other parishioners at Emanuel AME Church when a gunman opened fire during a bible study session.
The South Carolina legislature is taking steps to remove the Confederate flagfrom the statehouse grounds following the mass shooting at a historic African-American church in Charleston, but a group of congressmen are arguing the tragedy should prompt a greater response. Specifically, they argue it should give the U.S. Congress one more significant reason to take up gun control.
Family members of the nine people killed in last month's shooting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, traveled to the nation's capital Wednesday to turn their grief into action.
The families, accompanied by Charleston community leaders and advocates for more stringent gun laws, called on lawmakers in Congress to push for a vote on legislation that would expand background checks for gun sales.