Washington state’s legislature has failed to pass legislation aimed at restricting firearm magazine capacity and prohibiting the sale of guns defined as “assault weapons.”
According to KING 5, the magazine capacity limit bill passed out of House and Senate committees but never made it to the floor for debate before the 5 p.m. deadline Wednesday.
Both chambers of the legislature are led by Democratic majorities, but Republicans filed 120 amendments, an unusually high number, to the magazine capacity bill as a strategy to delay debate of the bill and potential passage of the legislation, as Wednesday was the floor cutoff deadline for the 2020 legislative session.
“Republican legislators have effectively filibustered the bill. That’s disappointing given that statewide polling shows that nearly two-thirds of Washingtonians support limiting high-capacity magazines. If there’s a mass shooting using a high-capacity magazine in one of our schools or communities, these legislators will be accountable to the victims and their families,” said Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat.
Gun control advocates were angered by the tactics used by Republicans in Olympia to stop the bills.
“We are outraged by this blatant attempt to misuse procedural measures to run out the clock on this lifesaving policy,” CEO of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility Renee Hopkins told KIRO 7.
Both of the gun control bills’ failures to pass in Washington come on the heels of an assault weapons ban bill failing to pass out of committee in the Democratic majority General Assembly in Virginia.
