On the recordJune 15, 2016
I so appreciate the Senator, and I wanted to ask him because his comments are right in line with the comments that I think are so important for people to understand. This past March, we got the first hard numbers from the impact of this law that we passed in Washington State. In addition to the nearly 4,000 felons who were caught illegally trying to buy a firearm in Washington through a licensed dealer--another 50 felons were prevented from buying guns from private sellers because of the provisions of the new law. According to data from the FBI, nearly 8,000 private sale background checks have occurred that otherwise would not have without changes in the law. So the fact that we now have this law in place in our State and are now seeing the results that we are actually stopping felons from getting firearms says to me that these are results that the rest of my colleagues and their States should look at. But we should do U.S. citizens a favor by, as you said, not continuing to have this be done State by State, but do it at the Federal level. I ask my colleague from Connecticut how aware he is of this movement and how important it is that the American public continue to demand that we deal with this issue.
