01.11.2010
The Oregon Legislature has announced the first of the firearms bills for 2021.
You can view them here.
The links will take you to a page with all the information about the bills including the bill language, sponsors, and amendments as they become available. It will also provide the bill history as it moves through the legislature and upcoming actions as they are scheduled.
When hearings are scheduled these links will also contain “meeting materials” such as uploaded testimony.
You can use this link to sign up for alerts from individual legislators and to get updates on any bills you are following.
As of this writing, the Legislative website has not updated this link to show bills to follow so check back at the link soon.
Here is a quick run down on the anti-gun bills.
HB 2510 is another mandatory lock up your guns bill. Basically a rehash of what the Democrats tried to force through last time.
HB 2543 eliminates the protection gun buyers have if the State Police can’t or won’t complete a background check. If they don’t complete the check you cannot buy a gun.
Sb 396 prohibits “undetectable firearms”. This is the Democrats hamfisted attempt to ban “ghost guns” “constructed or produced, including through a three-dimensional printing process, entirely of nonmetal substances”. The bill also redefines “unfinished frames and receivers “ as actual firearms and requires they be treated as such for possession and transfer.
SB 554 allows localities, schools, and airports to ban CHL holders from their property and any location near their property.The bill increases the fee for a CHL from $50 to $100.00 and renewals to $75.00. If you pick up a family member from the airport you can be charged with a Class C felony if you have a firearm even with a CHL. ( Obviously this applies only if you are carrying a gun.)
SB 585 repeals Oregon’s preemption law allowing any locality to create and enforce any gun law they choose.
SB 604 requires a permit to purchase firearms. The bill requires mandatory training, background checks, and fees. The bill requires safety training from the “National Firearms Association”. (Not a misprint) The permit must be renewed every 5 years.
As you know, pursuant to the rules imposed by the House Speaker and the Senate President, you will no longer be permitted to testify against these bills in the Capitol building. Remote testimony during the interim sessions was mostly a failure and people who signed up to testify often could not. Republican legislators who had comments that the chairs of the committees disagreed with were shut off. Do not expect to be treated differently.
So what does all this mean? The Democrats still have a super majority. They do not need a single Republican vote to pass any of these bills, and except for the permit to purchase bill, they have been trying to pass all this stuff for years. So they are determined. They are also blood thirsty and vindictive. The only reason some of this did not get passed last session was because the Republicans walked out. We have no way of knowing if they will again. Walking out is very costly and subjects Republicans to arrest.
For the last year the State Police and Sheriffs have used covid as an excuse to either not do their jobs (conducting background checks and issuing CHL’s) or to do them very badly.
As we have learned, nothing in the law compels sheriffs to accept CHL applications and nothing in the permit-to-purchase law compels them to accept applications to purchase.
While the law does require the State Police to provide an estimate of time it will take them to complete a background check for a current firearms purchase, they frequently ignore that law and face no liability for doing so. There is little reason to believe that these same practices will not apply to the permit-to-purchase law.
It is impossible for us to predict if the Democrats will be more successful eliminating your rights this session than they have in past. (The Democrats in the US Congress are also introducing an avalanche of anti-gun bills.) But it would be prudent to consider it likely and if you plan to own any firearms in the future, and you can find them, maybe now would be the time to acquire them. The same is true if you are considering an “unfinished” receiver purchase.
The session officially begins on Jan, 19th.