Washington, Jun 9 (IANS): The US House of Representatives has passed a gun package in the wake of the recent mass shootings in the country, but is unlikely to be approved by the evenly-divided Senate.

The package, dubbed the Protecting Our Kids Act, was passed late Wednesday in a 223-204 vote, largely along party lines, reports Xinhua news agency.

The legislation would, among other things, raise the minimum age for buying a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21 years old and ban bump stocks for civilians.

Senators from both sides of the aisle have engaged in gun legislation talks for a consensus on narrower gun legislation.

The move on Capitol Hill came as the US is reeling from the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student at Robb Elementary School who survived the shooting, told US lawmakers on Wednesday that she smeared herself in her friend's blood and played dead.

"He shot my friend that was next to me, and I thought he was going to come back to the room," Cerrillo, 11, said of the shooter in a recorded video to a House panel.

"So I grabbed the blood, and I put it all over me."

She also said she wanted "to have security" when going to school, where she no longer feels safe.

A series of mass shootings in the past few weeks has rocked the country and renewed national attention to gun violence.

At least 17 people were killed and 62 others injured in 11 mass shootings across the US over the past weekend.

Early Sunday morning, a shooting outside a nightclub in Chattanooga, Tennessee, led to three deaths and 14 injuries.

Hours earlier in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, several shooters opened fire at a crowd in a popular night-life area, killing three while wounding 11 others.

The US has suffered 251 mass shootings over the past five months or so, with more than 18,900 lives lost to gun violence, according to the latest data from Gun Violence Archive.