Oregon gun owners are being targeted by a new mandatory “safe storage” initiative submitted recently by a gun control group calling itself State of Safety Action, according to OregonLive.com.
This is a resurrection of an earlier effort that did not make it to the November 2018 ballot because advocates missed a deadline, the news agency said.
Initiative Petition 40, if it is passed, will require Beaver State gun owners to store firearms in “tamper-proof” containers or safes, or with trigger locks. The two-page measure also requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms within 24 hours of when they discover the gun to be missing.
The safe storage requirements were reportedly part of the sweeping gun control legislation that died in Salem earlier this summer. Majority Democrats axed the bill in an effort to bring Republicans back to work in order to vote on unrelated legislation.
Interestingly, Henry Wessinger, president of the gun control group, said the initiative petition will be a “backup” in the event Democrats are not successful with an anticipated revival of the legislation in 2020. In order to qualify for the ballot, anti-gunners need to collect 112,020 valid signatures, and State of Safety has reportedly said it will use aid signature gatherers.
By no small coincidence, this campaign was launched just days before former Congressman Bob Barr, writing at TownHall, ripped liberal anti-gunners for living in a world “of magic and fairytales.”
“Perhaps nowhere is the Left’s disconnect from reality more acute than in its assault on the Second Amendment,” Barr wrote. “Despite decades of gun control proposals debunked time and again, the same schemes and arguments regularly are recycled and repackaged. Democrats remain convinced that Americans are just waiting for permission to hand over their firearms and their God-given right to self-defense. After all, Democrats say, other countries are doing it, so why not us?”
His comments were aimed at the gushing enthusiasm with which liberal anti-gunners welcomed gun control restrictions enacted hastily in New Zealand following the mosque massacre in Christchurch in mid-March. At the time, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern led the charge to penalize law-abiding gun owners in the island nation for a crime they didn’t commit. But after bans on certain semi-auto firearms were announced, only about 700 of the nation’s estimated 1.5 million guns were surrendered. There is no gun registration in New Zealand, but officials there want to create a registry, which critics believe is aimed at future confiscation.
In his column, Barr took aim at media anti-gunners.
“It is doubtful the sycophants from the Mainstream Media tapped to preside over the Democratic presidential debates would dare to broach such a topic;” Barr contended, “but the American public deserves to hear what would be in store for them. If New Zealand is any indication, there is no fairytale ending, regardless of how hard Democrats otherwise try to pretend this elephant is not in the room.”
Standing between the United States gun owner and what is happening in New Zealand is the Second Amendment. The late retired Justice John Paul Stevens last year argued for the amendment’s repeal, which suggests he knew the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right as explained by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in his landmark majority opinion for District of Columbia v. Heller in June 2008.
