Sen. King touts new gun reform bill that would limit lethality of weapons

Nov. 30—U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, on Thursday touted a bill he introduced with a New Mexico senator that would reduce the lethality of weapons that are commonly used in mass shootings.

The bill would limit the magazine capacity of rifles and shotguns to 10 rounds, and 15 rounds for handguns.

"Our goal is simple, to save lives in Maine, New Mexico, and across the country," King said. In addition to the Lewiston tragedy on Oct. 25, there have been numerous mass shootings in the United States over the last 25 years, including in Newtown, Connecticut, Las Vegas, Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, and others.

During a news conference on Thursday afternoon, King and U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, discussed how the bill would work. They say it would limit the number of deaths in mass shootings by not only limiting the capacity of the magazines but also by making reloading a weapon more time-consuming.

The bill, if approved, would ban detachable magazines that make it easy and quick to reload weapons. Instead, the magazines would be a fixed, internal component of the gun, and weapons would have to be reloaded manually.

King said Robert Card, the Lewiston shooter, was likely able to kill as many as he did — 18 people in two locations — because he had high-capacity magazines on his AR-10 rifle that he was able to reload by duct-taping two magazines together. If a shooter has to take a longer time to reload, people would have more opportunities to escape or fight back, and law enforcement would have a better chance to subdue the shooter, King said.

"Two people charged the shooter in Lewiston, but he killed them both because he didn't have to stop and reload," King said, referring to two men who died after charging Card at one of the shooting sites, the Just-in-Time bowling alley. Card was found in a trailer in Lisbon on Oct. 27, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

King said the goal of the bill is to "focus on the lethality of the weapon, not what it looks like." That lethality includes not only the ability to quickly reload using detachable magazines but also the number of bullets each magazine can hold. If guns had a capacity of 10 rounds or 15 rounds and could not be rapidly re-loaded, it would reduce the number of casualties in some cases, King said.

However, no Republicans have pledged to support the bill, called the GOSAFE Act, an acronym for Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion.

King's fellow Maine senator, Republican Susan Collins, was briefed on the bill before it was introduced Thursday but her staff said she is continuing to review it.

U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, announced her support for King's bill on Thursday. Officials with U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, D-2nd District, couldn't immediately be reached for comment on Thursday. Golden announced the day after the shootings in his hometown of Lewiston that he had reversed his stance against an assault weapons ban and would work to get that bill passed.

King's bill quickly attracted opposition from gun rights advocates, including the powerful National Rifle Association.

"This legislation blatantly violates the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court rulings by banning the very types of firearms and magazines most often utilized by Americans for defending themselves and their families," Randy Kozuch, executive director of the NRA's legislative arm, said in a prepared statement. "This bill unjustly and improperly places the full burden of the law on law-abiding residents, while doing nothing to take guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals. The NRA opposes this legislation and will fight to protect the constitutional freedoms of all law-abiding Americans."

Criticism came from within Maine, as well.

"Semiautomatic arms have been commercially available in the U.S. for well over a century, and standard-capacity magazines are commonly owned. Senator King's bill, which would limit arms to a certain design and firearm magazines to a specific, arbitrary capacity, would clearly violate the people's civil rights," said state Rep. Donald Ardell, R-Monticello, in a statement.

"I oppose Angus King's new effort to limit law-abiding Mainers' Constitutional rights," state Rep. Joshua Morris, R-Turner, said in a prepared statement. "In 2016, Michael Bloomberg came up here and thought he could get Mainers to vote against their 2nd amendment rights (by expanding background check requirements for gun purchases). That proposal was defeated, but Sen. King's new gun control bill makes it clear that the lessons of Bloomberg's defeat were not learned by progressive Democrats like King."

The White House announced its support for the bill on Thursday.

"We support any effort to keep assault weapons and high-capacity magazines out of dangerous hands, as this bill would do," said Stefanie Feldman, director of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. "President Biden led the passage of the assault weapons ban through Congress in 1994 (when he was a senator from Delaware), which worked to significantly reduce mass shootings. And since Senate Republicans allowed it to expire in 2005, he has tirelessly fought to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines once and for all."

Lindsay Nichols, policy director for Giffords Law Center, which advocates for gun safety reforms, said the GOSAFE Act and another bill banning assault weapons would both be effective at saving lives.

"The Heinrich/King bill represents a newer approach, and we are very grateful to all these members of Congress who are working to address the horrific damage done by these weapons. The most important thing is that Congress and state policymakers should move forward to address this problem. Either approach would be a huge step to making our communities safer," Nichols said.

Pingree, in a statement, said she's long advocated for an assault weapons ban.

"It's devastating to consider that if we had strong gun legislation before the Lewiston shooting, Mainers' lives may have been spared," Pingree said. "I am encouraged by Senators King and Heinrich's proposal to stop these weapons of war from flooding our communities."

Fred Guttenberg, a gun reform activist whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, died in the Parkland shootings in 2018, said the GOSAFE Act would help reduce gun violence.

"I don't look at things as "first steps" or "best steps." I look at it that if passed will it help reduce instances of gun violence and the gun violence death rate? From that standpoint, (the bill) does," Guttenberg said.

The GOSAFE Act would prohibit the manufacture, sale, and re-sale of guns that would not meet the regulations, but already-owned guns could be passed down to family members or sold back to the government through a gun buyback program. The bill would also ban bump stocks, which make guns fire at a faster rate.

As for the bill's prospects, Republicans are typically against gun control measures, and Republicans currently have the majority in the U.S. House. Democrats control the Senate and the White House.

King and Heinrich pointed to the recent success of the Safer Communities Act — which contained modest gun reforms such as making it harder for those convicted of domestic violence to possess guns. The Safer Communities Act was signed into law in 2022.

"We are very much hoping we can generate some momentum," King said. "You never know when the time will come, and the time will be right for a particular piece of legislation."