Victory for gun responsibility! Washington State Senate passes bill banning bump stocks

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.