Senator Martin Heinrich holds gun legislation roundtable with special guests, including Doña Ana County Sheriff

WASHINGTON, D.C. (KVIA) -- U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), along with the non-profit advocacy group March Fourth, hosted a roundtable at the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday to discuss new gun legislation introduced by Heinrich and three other U.S. senators.

Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart also spoke at the event, along with a New Mexico resident & hunter, actress & gun owner Melissa Joan Hart, actor Wilson Cruz, who's step-aunt died in the Pulse nightclub shooting, and Melissa Alexander, who's the mother of a Covenant School Shooting survivor.

The GOSAFE Act, which is an acronym for gas-operated semi automatic firearms exclusion, is "designed to protect communities from gun violence, while safeguarding Americans’ constitutional right to own a firearm for legitimate self-defense, hunting, and sporting purposes."

According to Heinrich's office, the act would protect the constitutional right to own a gun based on a firearm’s established use for self-defense, hunting or sporting purposes, while also banning firearms that use detachable, high-capacity magazines.

The main goal is to "limit a firearm’s ability to inflict maximum harm in a short amount of time by directly regulating large capacity ammunition feeding devices." The bill would look to achieve this by limiting the number of rounds that large capacity ammunition feeding devices are permitted to carry to 10 rounds of ammunition or fewer.

Guns that would be exempt from the proposed legislation include .22 caliber rimfire or less firearms, bolt action rifles, semi-automatic shotguns, recoil-operated handguns, any rifle with a permanently fixed magazine of 10 rounds or less, any shotgun with a permanently fixed magazine of 10 rounds or less, and any handgun with a permanently fixed magazine of 15 rounds or less.

The act would also ban conversion devices, including bump stocks and Glock switches.

"I was very attracted to this [bill] because if you have a fixed magazine, that's certainly giving law enforcement much more opportunity to move in on a situation and take action before there are any more casualties," said Sheriff Stewart on Wednesday.

The bill was read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on Finance back on November, 30th.