The Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced a measure that would for the first time make it a crime to illegally purchase firearms for another person. The vote came as the panel began debating a proposal to ban military assault rifles, an effort that has far less support. The bill’s author, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, spoke in favor of its passage.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: “While homicides, in general, are down in this country, mass killings are not. And the fact is that these assault weapons have a great attraction for grievance killers, the people that go into law offices, as they did in San Francisco, and shoot down 40 — 14 people, the man who went into the Aurora theater just to kill people with a 100-round drum in an assault weapons. And we’ve seen it in universities. We’ve seen them in elementary schools. And now we have seen them used against first graders. The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons.”