Norton to Combat Attack on D.C. Gun Laws - Again

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The office of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) announced that Representative Phil Gingrey (R-GA) filed an amendment in the House Rules Committee to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014, which the House is expected to vote on this week, expressing the sense of the Congress that active duty military personnel in their private capacity should be exempt from the gun laws of the District of Columbia, but not those of any other state or locality. Gingrey earlier this year introduced the amendment as a stand-alone bill. Last Congress, Ginrgey added this resolution as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 on the House floor. However, Norton, with the help of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI), House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) and the gun safety community, got the provision removed from the version of the bill the president signed into law. In case the amendment passes the Republican-led House again this year, Norton has already been in contact with Senate allies to keep the provision out of the final bill.

"Representative Gingrey's anti-home-rule amendment continues a pattern of Republican assaults on our local rights and gun safety laws, which we know how to fight," said Norton. "We defeated the Gingrey amendment last Congress and will work with our Senate and gun safety allies to defeat it again. Today, after Newtown, when there have been serious attempts to toughen gun safety laws across the country and even here in the Congress, the Gingrey amendment goes in the opposite direction and attempts to use active duty personnel to further his own gun agenda. Rather than addressing the needs of his own constituents, Representative Gingrey is spending his time meddling in a district more than 600 miles away from his own. If there were a problem involving guns and our active military, he would not target only the District of Columbia."

Published: June 11, 2013