U.S. House panel seeks gun marketing, sales data after shootings

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives’ oversight panel called on five gunmakers to hand over details on the manufacturing, marketing and sales of firearms used in mass shootings, the committee’s chairwoman said on Friday following recent attacks.

House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney requested the data in letters sent Thursday to Daniel Defense, Bushmaster, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson Brands Inc and Sturm, Ruger & Company Inc, she said in a statement.

“I am deeply concerned that gun manufacturers continue to profit from the sale of weapons of war,” congresswoman Maloney wrote, citing the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles used in this week’s shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, 10 days earlier.

None of the five gun manufacturers immediately responded to a request for comment on the House panel’s request.

An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on Tuesday. Ten people were killed by a white supremacist at the supermarket a predominantly Black neighborhood in the city in western New York on May 14.

Polling shows a majority of Americans support moderate or strong regulation of gun ownership, but some lawmakers have suggested they would not back any legislative fixes.

Gun safety advocates are pushing Democratic President Joe Biden to take stronger action on his own to curb gun violence following the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade, but the White House has said Congress must pass laws to have more impact.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin separately said his committee would hold a June 15 hearing focused on gun violence and children, noting government data released this week showing guns were now the leading cause of death among U.S. youth.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, also found more children and teenagers in the United States are now killed by guns, surpassing any other cause of death, in an analysis based on U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality data and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Diane Bartz and Mike Stone in Washington and Aishwarya Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Tim Ahmann, Jonathan Oatis and Bernard Orr)