VIDEO: Latz Advances Bill For Tighter Gun Control Measures

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday split on a party-line vote in approving a bill that contains key gun control provisions pushed by District 46 Sen. Ron Latz.

The bill would change gun laws to:

• Require background check for most private gun sales, although transfers within families are exempt;
• Send mental health information to a national database and accelerate the time in which officials send information to state and national databases;
• Expand the types of crimes and mental health cases that disqualify someone from owning a gun and
• Increase penalties for those who buy guns for those who are legally barred from doing so themselves.

The approval of the Judiciary Committee—on which Latz is the chairman—follows days of gun control debate in the committee. Critics argued that background checks are overly inconvenient and that they won’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals, who won’t submit to background checks anyway.

Latz—whose district includes Golden Valley, Hopkins, Plymouth and St. Louis Park—countered that it’s just a minor inconvenience and that his intent isn’t to stop gun sales or track who has firearms.

“It simply proposes to provide what I would term a very minor inconvenience of going through a background check before being able to engage in that transfer—a public safety-related background check,” Latz said. “The point is not to track the transfer of firearms. The point is to do a background check on the transferees. That’s the point is to keep the guns out of the hands of people that are ineligible to possess them.”

The House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee is scheduled to hear a companion bill next week.