JEFFERSON CITY — Although reflected in less than two paragraphs in the official Senate Journal, an event on the floor of the Missouri Senate in the eighth week of the Second Regular Session of the 97th General Assembly will go down in the annals of Missouri politics as the night a firebrand of a senator stomped her high heels to the ground in front of the most powerful interest group in America, the National Rifle Association.

Holding and commanding the Senate floor for more than five hours, Sen. Jamilah Nasheed gave a passionate and intelligent denigration of the organization known for bullying politicians.  Her floor fight with the NRA was a continuation of the controversy that had begun the week prior, when the NRA erupted with outrage due to an amendment Sen. Nasheed succeeded in attaching to a conservative-backed gun bill sponsored by Sen. Brian Nieves, R-Washington. Sen. Nieves’ bill would have, in essence, nullified federal laws on gun control, such as background checks in the state of Missouri. Sen. Nasheed’s amendment simply required owners of stolen guns to report the loss to the authorities within 72 hours of learning of the loss.

However, no sooner than Senators Nasheed and Nieves — from opposite ends of the political spectrum — had remarkably displayed the proverbial “working across the aisle,” the NRA swooped in with an orchestrated email and text campaign to torpedo the entire legislation, even Sen. Nieves’ underlying gun bill — labeled by conservatives as the strongest Second Amendment gun rights bill in the nation.  The pressure by the NRA on the majority caucus, who were all set to vote on the bill including the amendment, was relentless and overbearing, to the point that, out of sheer fear, the majority caucus stalled a final vote of the bill until they had stripped the bill of Sen. Nasheed’s amendment.

When that action on the floor was taken to sever the 72-hour reporting requirement from the main gun bill, Sen. Nasheed, who, like the other senators, had not expected a long evening, rose to her feet — in black high heels — and began a filibuster that carried on into the night. She brazenly lambasted her Senate colleagues on the floor for “being punked” by the NRA, and rejected plea after plea from senators to relent and end the debate, so they could retire for the evening.  When one senator quietly slipped Sen. Nasheed a note at one point, asking if she needed assistance to find a way out of the filibuster, Sen. Nasheed responded defiantly on the floor, “I’m not looking for a way out!”