April 17, 2013

NSSF Statement after Senate Votes

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Today, the U.S. Senate voted on several measures that would have impacted the firearms and ammunition industry and our Second Amendment rights. Thanks to the hard work of our allies in the Senate, in the end no anti-gun measures were adopted.

The flawed Manchin-Toomey amendment, opposed by NSSF, was defeated as was Senator Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) amendment to institute a new “assault weapons ban” and an arbitrary limit on magazine capacity. Unfortunately, a handful of positive, solutions-based amendments also failed to pass the Senate.The NSSF-backed Grassley substitute amendment, which would have improved current law and fixed the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), fell short by one of the closer margins of today’s amendments.

All Americans share the goal of wanting to make our communities safer. The civil debate on the Senate floor today further shows that reasonable minds can disagree on how to best achieve this goal. Looking ahead, NSSF will continue to work to find real solutions that improve current law, fix the NICS background check system to ensure all appropriate criminal and adjudicated mental health records are entered into the system, to provide law enforcement with additional tools they need to arrest and prosecute illegal firearms traffickers and straw purchasers and to urge effective, consistent enforcement of existing laws, all without infringing our Constitutional rights and unduly burdening our industry.

Today’s votes do not represent the end of the discussion in Congress or in America. NSSF looks forward to moving ahead with the work that remains to be done to try and help make our families safer and preserve our firearms freedoms.

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