04.02.15

Action on the gun owner registration bill, SB 941, was postponed today until Monday.

The reason was because of an amendment that was proposed by Senator Kim Thatcher.

The amendment would eliminate the proposed expensive, intrusive and inaccurate background checks that would be required for private transfers, and replace them with a system whereby only prohibited persons would be identified.

Although the details would need some fine tuning, how it would work would be this: If you are a prohibited person, your driver’s license would include an indicator, just as it does now for corrective lenses or organ donors.

Non prohibited persons would have no change. If you wanted to transfer a firearm you would only need to see the back of the recipients driver’s license or state ID card. If there is no prohibitor the transfer is made with no background check, no fee, no registration and no paperwork.

There will be no record of the transfer and no list of guns or gun owners.

Transfers at dealers would have no changes, except a dealer would have the advantage of knowing beforehand that a person was going to be denied and could save himself the time and expense of running the check.

Because of the speed at which bills and amendments are created, there is no question that there will need to be technical adjustments, but it does put the gun grabbers in an interesting situation. It basically gives them everything they have demanded; a way to prevent transfers to prohibited people, but without the registration they claim they were not seeking. (Of course they are lying about that so now what will they say?)

If the background check system is as easy and reliable as the anti-gun crowd claims it is, they should be totally on board with this idea. Monday promises to be interesting.

Yesterday we told you about HB 3093. This bill would allow certain people who have permits to carry concealed handguns in other states to carry in Oregon. We said we thought the bill was a bad idea. Some folks misunderstood our stand. Our objection was not to allowing non residents to carry in Oregon. We’ve been working on that for many years. Our objection was to allowing the State Police to decide which states they would recognize. This was a power they had in the past and refused to recognize a single state.

Our preference would be to do away with permits and move to Constitutional Carry as more and more states are doing, but we would support starting with recognizing other states. We do not want the State Police to decide which ones. We are working on amendments which should address this issue. If they are adopted, the bill will be a great first step in ending Oregon’s absurd policy of not recognizing a single other state’s permit.

In a touch of interesting timing, we have been informed that Columbia County has added its name to the list of counties standing up for the Second Amendment. We will post it as soon as we have a completed copy. To the people who worked tirelessly to make that happen, thank you!