Alliance for Gun Responsibility marchers at the 2016 Pride Parade
Alliance for Gun Responsibility marchers at the 2016 Pride Parade

The good news out of Olympia just keeps on coming.

By a vote of twen­ty-nine to twen­ty, the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate tonight vot­ed to ban bump stocks, the now-infa­mous devices that were used in the hor­rif­ic Las Vegas mas­sacre, the dead­liest mass shoot­ing in Amer­i­can history.

Four Repub­li­cans crossed par­ty lines to join all twen­ty-five Democ­rats in sup­port of ESB 5992: Joe Fain, Mark Milos­cia, Cur­tis King, and Hans Zeiger.

The full roll call was as follows:

ESB 5992
Trig­ger mod­i­fi­ca­tion devices
Sen­ate vote on 3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
1/25/2018

Yeas: 29; Nays: 20

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tor Bil­lig, Car­lyle, Chase, Cleve­land, Con­way, Darneille, Dhin­gra, Fain, Frockt, Hasegawa, Hobbs, Hunt, Keis­er, King, Kud­er­er, Liias, McCoy, Milos­cia, Mul­let, Nel­son, Palum­bo, Ped­er­sen, Ranker, Rolfes, Sal­daña, Takko, Van De Wege, Well­man, Zeiger

Vot­ing Nay: Sen­a­tor Angel, Bai­ley, Baum­gart­ner, Beck­er, Braun, Brown, Erick­sen, For­tu­na­to, Hawkins, Hon­ey­ford, O’Ban, Pad­den, Rivers, Schoesler, Shel­don, Short, Wag­oner, Walsh, War­nick, Wilson

NPI con­grat­u­lates the Sen­ate on once again mus­ter­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al major­i­ty to pass an impor­tant bill that will save lives and strength­en our communities.

The Sen­ate is tru­ly on a roll. Dur­ing the past two weeks, the cham­ber has vot­ed to expose dark mon­ey in pol­i­tics, pass the cap­i­tal bud­get that did­n’t get a vote last year, approve same-day vot­er reg­is­tra­tion, ban LGBT “con­ver­sion ther­a­py”, give a thumbs up to Break­fast After the Bell, extend a help­ing hand to DREAM­ers, and pro­tect trans­gen­der stu­dents from bul­ly­ing. And Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Sharon Nel­son (D‑34th Dis­trict: Seat­tle) says there’s more to come… much more.

It is won­der­ful to see so many good bills final­ly get­ting votes on the Sen­ate floor after years of obstruc­tion and delay. The Sen­ate’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty seems to have found their groove. They’re now res­cu­ing and pass­ing out bills that had been stuck in the Repub­li­cans’ grave­yard of progress on a near-dai­ly basis.

Sharon Nel­son and her lead­er­ship team are to be com­mend­ed for ensur­ing that the peo­ple’s busi­ness gets done — and in a time­ly fash­ion. With the coop­er­a­tion of the House and Gov­er­nor Inslee, they have a chance to real­ly move our state for­ward this ses­sion. We in Wash­ing­ton State are in a posi­tion to take a much more respon­si­ble and inclu­sive path than the coun­try as a whole. And we must.

About the author

Andrew Villeneuve is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, as well as the founder of NPI's sibling, the Northwest Progressive Foundation. He has worked to advance progressive causes for over two decades as a strategist, speaker, author, and organizer. Andrew is also a cybersecurity expert, a veteran facilitator, a delegate to the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, and a member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

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3 replies on “Victory for gun responsibility! Washington State Senate passes bill banning bump stocks”

  2. If you think this will stop shoot­ings in no gun zones you are out of your mind.

    There are only two things that will stop shoot­ings in no gun zones.

    Elim­i­nate the no gun zones.

    Good guys with guns.

    If you think crim­i­nals will fol­low laws like this you only need to look at some of the most gun con­trolled cities and nations across the globe.

    1. Actu­al­ly, if we look at cities and coun­tries with strict gun safe­ty laws, Steven (like Aus­tralia) what we find is that they don’t have a prob­lem with mass shoot­ings. Gun respon­si­bil­i­ty laws work. Of course, we won’t be able to sim­ply copy what oth­er coun­tries have done; we need our own solu­tions. We can start by pro­hibit­ing civil­ians from own­ing weapons of war like the AR-15 that were designed sole­ly to make the slaugh­ter of oth­er human beings effi­cient, and devices like bump fire stocks that allow semi-auto­mat­ic weapons cur­rent­ly being sold to oper­ate like machine guns, which are already prohibited. 

      The notion that we should not leg­is­late to address this pub­lic safe­ty and pub­lic health cri­sis because crim­i­nals will not fol­low the laws we cre­ate is an argu­ment for hav­ing no laws at all.

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