Democratic Governor Jay Inslee signed a statewide ban on assault-style semiautomatic rifles throughout Washington, making the state at least the tenth to prohibit the “manufacture, importation, distribution and sale” of the guns, CNN reports. The ban includes the AR-15 model and its copycats, and dozens of other semiautomatic rifles.
The legislation passed the state house by a 56 to 42 vote and the state senate by a vote of 28 to 21, largely along Party lines. It reads in part: “The legislature finds and declares that gun violence is a threat to the public health and safety of Washingtonians. Assault weapons are civilian versions of weapons created for the military and are designed to kill humans quickly and efficiently.”
Eight other states–California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York–have similar bans on specific semi-automatic weapons. Hawaii has a ban on semiautomatic pistols, but not rifles.