For background checks

As a registered nurse, I have both a professional and personal interest in the health and safety of our community. So I already had planned on voting “yes” on Initiative 594 this November to close the background check loophole. But new statistics have confirmed that background checks are effective at keeping guns out of dangerous hands.

In Washington, federal background checks have stopped more than 40,000 gun sales to prohibited purchasers since 1998. Of those, more than 6,000 were domestic abusers.

But we can do even more to reduce crime and keep our kids safe.

Currently, handguns sold by licensed dealers go through a background check. But there’s a loophole that makes it easy to evade a background check by buying a gun from an unlicensed seller online, at a gun show or from a stranger.

Initiative 594 closes that loophole. In states with background checks on all handgun sales, 38 percent fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners and 39 percent fewer law enforcement officers are murdered with handguns.

We must do everything we can to make our kids and communities safer, and I- 594 is a step in that direction. Join me in voting “yes” on Initiative 594.

Barb Lee

Spokane