HB 2947 — Firearms safety measures
HB 2947 was introduced in the 2019-20 Washington legislative session by Valdez. It received 1 public hearing and did not become law.
Dying without a vote is the ordinary outcome for a Washington bill, not a scandal and not a failure of any one person. This page shows where it stopped, who was recorded, and what the record does not say.
- 2019-20 session
- House
- Did not become law
- 1 public hearing
- Sponsor: Valdez
Source Washington State Legislature web services: legislation, hearings and roll calls · as of 2026-08-12 · introduced 2020-02-21
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Where it stopped
Died
- Last recorded action
- First reading, referred to Finance.
- Position
- H Finance — the Legislature's own location code
- Last committee
- House Finance — the last committee with this bill on an agenda
- Public hearing
- Yes — 1 on record — a public hearing is where testimony is taken; an executive session is where a committee votes
Source WA Legislature legislation service · as of 2026-08-12
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What it would do
The Legislature’s own description. We do not paraphrase legislation.
Establishing firearms-related safety measures.
Legal title AN ACT Relating to establishing firearms-related safety measures to increase public safety by prohibiting the manufacture, possession, distribution, importation, selling, offering for sale, purchasing, or transfer of large capacity magazines, and making a violation of these restrictions a gross misdemeanor offense, by defining large capacity magazines to apply to ammunition feeding devices with the capacity to accept more than fifteen rounds of ammunition, by allowing continued possession of large capacity magazines limited to those possessed prior to June 11, 2020, and those inherited on or after June 11, 2020, subject to restrictions on the ability to sell or transfer such large capacity magazines, requiring that they be stored in secure gun storage, and permitting their possession only on the owner's property or while engaged in lawful outdoor recreational activities or use at a licensed shooting range or when transporting the large capacity magazine to or from these locations unloaded and in a locked separate container, by providing limited exemptions solely for government officers, agents, or employees, or government contractors who provide firearms training to law enforcement, while acting within official duties, for licensed manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of sale of large capacity magazines to law enforcement or the military, for licensed dealers who acquire large capacity magazines from lawful owners for the purposes of sale to a resident of another state, for gunsmiths for the purpose of service or repair of a large capacity magazine, for individuals for the purpose of lawfully participating in an officially sanctioned sport shooting event or while lawfully engaged in shooting at a licensed shooting range, for law enforcement and corrections officers and military members while acting within the scope of official duties, for retired law enforcement officers who receive a large capacity magazine in connection with their separation from service, and for individuals for the purpose of permanently relinquishing a large capacity magazine to law enforcement for destruction, by establishing a large capacity magazine buy-back program to be operated by the Washington state patrol between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, within amounts appropriated for this purpose that allows a resident to receive compensation for up to five large capacity magazines in an amount determined by the Washington state patrol based on fair market value, by creating a public records act exemption for personal information of persons participating in the large capacity magazine buy-back program, and by repealing the precious metal bullion and monetized bullion tax preference to fund the large capacity magazine buy-back program;
Source WA Legislature legislation service · as of 2026-08-12
03
The votes
Recorded floor votes. Committee votes are in the hearing record below.
No recorded floor vote. The bill never reached the floor of either chamber, so no member is on record for or against it.
Last checked 2026-08-12
04
Sponsors
Who put their name to the bill. The Legislature records a prime sponsor on the bill status; the full co-sponsor roster appears only in the introduced bill text, which we have not ingested.
Prime sponsor
Valdez
as printed the sponsor line on the bill status record · introduced in the House. A committee substitute prints the committee here, with the originating member in parentheses.
The co-sponsor roster is not on this page. We hold the prime sponsor the Legislature prints on the bill status, not the list of co-sponsors, which is published only in the introduced bill text we have not ingested. A co-sponsor count here would be a number no record we hold contains.
Source WA Legislature legislation service · as of 2026-08-12
05
The hearing record
Every committee meeting where this bill appeared on the agenda. Public is where testimony is taken; Executive is where the committee votes.
| Date | Type | Committee | Chamber |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-02-25 | Public | House Finance | House |
Source WA Legislature committee hearing records · as of 2026-08-12 · 1 public, 0 executive
06
What changed between versions
Only one version on file. The bill was never substituted or engrossed, or the legislation service returns only the surviving version for this session — for completed biennia it usually returns the latter.
Last checked 2026-08-12
07
Connected records
Every link in this section is an edge in the entity graph: a row in one table, carrying the document that states it. Grouped by how well the record supports it.
Composite · 1
Two documents joined on a key, and the key is named here.
-
DIED IN · biennium 2019-20
House Committee on Finance
joined on: cutoff calendar + last journal action
HB 2947 status history, 2019-20 — bill summary, WA State Legislature · as of 2020-02-21
Source Entity graph, synced from the pipeline · as of 2026-08-12 · Votes are in the graph but render as roll-call tables above, not as rows here. Hearings, referrals and companion bills are not in the graph yet.
08
What this page will not compute
Each of these is a number a reader might reasonably expect. None of them follow from the records we hold, so we do not publish them.
- Who killed it
- We can say a bill was never scheduled for a public hearing. We cannot say who decided that. Chairs control agendas, but the record does not attribute a non-decision to a person, and we will not infer one from a committee roster.
- Why it died
- Withdrawn, superseded by its own companion, folded into a budget, or simply never taken up — all four look identical in the data.
- Whether lobbying affected it
- Washington collects lobbyist compensation and employer registrations, but none of those filings name a bill. There is no documented link between a lobbying report and a bill number, so we publish none.
- What changed between versions
- We hold the version list, not the text of each version.
- How a member would have voted
- Only recorded votes appear here. A member absent from a roll call is recorded as absent, not as opposed.
09
Common questions
- What happened to HB 2947?
- HB 2947 did not become law. It stopped in House Finance. The 2019-20 session ended without it passing both chambers, so it is not law.
- Who sponsored HB 2947?
- The prime sponsor of record is Valdez, as printed on the bill status. This page does not list co-sponsors — that roster is published only in the introduced bill text, which we have not ingested.
- What would HB 2947 do?
- In the Legislature’s own description: “Establishing firearms-related safety measures.” We quote the official language rather than summarising, because a paraphrase of legislation is an interpretation.
- Was there a recorded vote on HB 2947?
- HB 2947 never reached a recorded floor vote in either chamber, so no member is on record for or against it.
- Did HB 2947 get a public hearing?
- Yes — 1 public hearing is on record. A public hearing is where testimony is taken; it is not the committee vote, which happens in an executive session.
Cite this page
This is public-records reporting. Use it, and say where it came from.
“HB 2947 — Firearms safety measures,” WashingtonIndependents.org, data as of 2026-08-12, accessed 2026-09-08. https://washingtonindependents.org/bill/2019-20-hb-2947/
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How this page is built
Every figure above is read from a primary source and rebuilt on a schedule. Nothing here is modelled or inferred; where a source is silent the page says so rather than filling the gap.
- WA Legislature legislation service
- Bill id, titles, sponsor, introduced date, and the history line and location code we render as its status.
- WA Legislature committee hearing records
- Every committee agenda this bill appeared on, and whether each was a public hearing or an executive session.
- WA Legislature roll call service
- Recorded floor votes, member by member.
- Outcome
- Derived, not published by the Legislature. Enacted means a chapter number or effective date is on record; died is only ever assigned once a session has ended; a sitting session yields pending and no death is asserted.
- Not loaded
- Bill text, amendments, committee votes as individual member records, testimony, and fiscal notes.