Joe Manchin: “last week Senator Toomey, my dear friend from Pennsylvania, and I introduced this important piece of bipartisan…”

“last week Senator Toomey, my dear friend from Pennsylvania, and I introduced this important piece of bipartisan legislation with our colleagues Senator Kirk and Senator Schumer. It is called the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act because that is what it does. This bill protects the safety of the public and our constitutional right to bear arms. Since we introduced the bill, there has been a lot of misinformation about this legislation. I wish to set the record straight with hard facts about our proposal and what it will do and what it will not do. I think people need to understand how guns first get into their life, which is through a commercial sale of some sort. We are not talking about creating any new laws; we are making the laws we have uniform. First of all, today we have on the books FFL--Federal firearms licensed--dealers, and there are approximately 55,000 throughout the United States of America. We all have one close to us in our neighborhood. These are friends of mine and people I know. If a person goes to a licensed dealer today and purchases a gun, they are required to do a criminal background check. The background check is basically to see if that person is able to have a gun. That licensed dealer puts that record of the background check they did, and only he or she, as a licensed dealer, can keep it. It is against the law to form some type of registry.…”