Gary Ackerman Quotes

Gun owners and non-gun owners alike agree on expanding background checks, making gun trafficking a serious crime with stiff penalties, making it illegal for all stalkers and all domestic abusers to buy guns, and expanding mental health resources so the mentally ill find it easier to receive treatment than to buy firearms.

Our experience in Hawaii has shown that we can place common sense limits on gun sales, demonstrate our respect for gun owners, and, most importantly, help ensure the safety of our residents.

Respecting the Second Amendment does not mean abandoning common sense. The right to own guns in this country must remain, while we also must strengthen our laws to prevent mass shootings.

What we do in Connecticut is ban assault weapons. We ban high-capacity magazines. We have true universal background checks, and we require everybody to get a permit from their police department before they can carry a pistol.

If I'm able to communicate one thing to adults, it would be this: it should not be easier to purchase a gun than it is to obtain a driver's license, and military-grade weapons should not be accessible in civilian settings.

It defies common sense that stores are fined for selling toy guns to children, but someone who isn't even allowed to board an airplane in this country can purchase as many real guns he wants with no questions asked.

There is such a thing as commonsense middle-ground gun reform, and most gun owners support it.

So many deaths could be prevented if measures were implemented to expand background checks and keep individuals like John Hinckley from ever buying firearms in the first place.

Background checks, waiting periods, reports of transfers, and access to mental health records have not stopped the legal sale of firearms to legitimate buyers.

Let me share some facts with you about the law in most of our country. California is in many ways a little different from the rest of the world, and California has better gun laws than many states, although California's need to be improved.

From Texas to New Hampshire and everywhere in between, we know that support for policies such as expanded background checks continue to be popular in both parties.

I am open and willing to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle on a variety of appropriate measures we can take to prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands and mitigate future tragedies.

Safe storage and child access prevention laws are critical steps as we seek to reduce the occurrence of accidental shootings and suicides involving guns.

We've got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch.

We have to go to war against the people who enable the gun violence, the people who stop us from keeping guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people, of felons, and that means the NRA leadership.

The Brady Act was passed in response to what Congress described as an 'epidemic of gun violence.'

Apparently, the heart of opposition to new gun regulations is in the white community. Yet white people face far less daily violence with guns.

I think that it's very, very hard for the NRA to continue to defend the position that people who are on the terrorist watch list should be allowed to buy firearms in this country. That's their position. I don't know how they stand by it.

I'm concerned about how accessible guns are.

Nothing in the opinion, should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you

Do we really need to arm our citizens with machine guns or semiautomatic weapons? And don't we need to make sure that people who do own guns are qualified to own them?

In Colorado, we passed universal background checks and magazine limits. We need to do that nationally, and we need to raise the purchase age, extend waiting periods for gun purchases, fund gun violence research, pass red flag laws, and more - no matter how hard the gun lobby tries to block it.

Closing the gun show loophole would be a good thing to do.

I definitely think there should be stronger gun safety laws, including prohibiting the sale of assault weapons, probably banning the sale of certain magazines that allow you to fire a large amount of bullets.