Debate Begins On Oregon Gun Bills

Oregon.

What can you say about the state? To be fair, I didn’t have all that much of an opinion about Oregon other than it had beautiful scenery and my kind of climate, much like Washington state. It also had Portland, a city that’s so ridiculous that a TV show was created to point out how ridiculous it is. Since I’ve never been there, I reserved judgment.

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But the state has embraced gun control completely and fully, and on that, I’m not about to pretend to reserve judgment.

Now, Oregon has started a debate on a new slew of anti-gun proposals.

For the Oregon Legislature, it’s not a question of whether any firearms legislation will pass this session.

It’s really a question about what will pass. Gov. Kate Brown has made firearms legislation a priority. Democratic leadership, in the majority, is backing her up.

Lawmakers also have ideas of their own. So do high school students from Lake Oswego.

The debate runs along a well-worn path for legislators in Oregon and statehouses across the nation in recent years. The nation’s wave of mass shootings has heightened public awareness of the consequences of firearms, particularly high-powered rifles, falling into the wrong hands.

The proposals — like mandatory gun locks, defining assault rifles and limiting ammunition purchases — draw criticism from Oregonians seeking to protect their way of life and fearful that legislation will have unintended consequences that go beyond preventing tragedies.

Mandatory gun locks and the whole “assault rifle” thing isn’t new or unusual. While they’re wrongheaded to an extreme, they’re not particularly surprising, groundbreaking, or anything else other than the same sort of troubling any gun control proposal is.

But for me, the big concern out of Oregon is the ammunition issue.

Unsurprisingly, this article glosses over just how restrictive the Oregon bill would be. A license would be required to buy ammunition–meaning you couldn’t ask a family member to pick up a box while out and about unless they happened to be licensed–and it would also limit you to just 20 rounds per month. That’s not even a good day at the range.

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Additionally, the state is considering a five-round limit on all handguns. Old West cowboys had more of a round capacity, for crying out loud. The bill would ban most revolvers unless it somehow expressly excludes them from consideration. It would pretty much rule out any semi-automatic without special magazines that aren’t likely to be particularly common.

And the fact that anything like this is even being debated is mindboggling. I mean, intellectually I know that when Democrats claim they want “common sense gun laws” they ultimately mean a total ban, but it’s still difficult for me to wrap my head around the blatant attempts to destroy our right to keep and bear arms.

Just 20 rounds per month isn’t enough to conduct proper practice, yet one of the criticism anti-gunners want to level against gun owners is that we’re not trained.

With a limit like that, we never will be. Then again, maybe that’s the point?

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