Today You Became A Criminal
09.01.2024
Today, Oregon’s latest bipartisan gun ban takes effect.
Oregonians who have honorably followed in the footsteps of America’s most innovative firearms creators by crafting firearms or firearm parts themselves are officially criminals.
HB 2005 makes it a crime to make or be in possession of any modern firearm or certain firearm’s parts unless those have been serialized in accordance with federal rules.
The only exceptions are firearms made before 1968 if the manufacturer did not include a serial number.
Make no mistake, this latest effort to trash the Second Amendment was brought to you by both Republicans and Democrats and could have easily been stopped if the Oregon House Republicans had a spine instead of an obsessive need to capitulate to the ruling party.
The reporting on this new law by the regime media has been amazingly sloppy even by today’s standards of “journalism”. Let’s not even get into their absurd assumption that “unserialized guns are assembled at home and can be easily purchased online, but can’t be picked up in a metal detector.”
Lauren Drake, from OPB, the state’s official propaganda arm, wrote:
“ The Oregon Department of Justice has issued a fact sheet to explain key parts of the new law and a list of federally licensed gun dealers in the state that can serialize firearms.”
Drake apparently did not bother to read the one page “fact sheet” (which included few facts) that she quoted. The “fact sheet” does nothing of the sort. In “fact” the sheet actually says:
“To comply, firearms, frames and receivers that do not have serial numbers can be taken to a federally licensed gun dealer (FFL) to be serialized. Visit your local gun shop and ask how you can get your items serialized. A list of FFLs in Oregon is available on the ATF website.2”
Drake, who knows better because we told her, does not see the absurdity in the Attorney General of Oregon advising gun owners to get a legal opinion from a gun store.
This idiotic advice from a rabidly anti-gun Attorney General is like advising someone searching for a 1972 Ferrari to Google “used car dealers.” Currently we know of no FFL’s who both have the proper licenses and equipment to serialize guns and are willing put their names on a gun made by someone else. If you know of any FFL’s that are willing to provide this service please let us know.
But if there are any it will probably no longer matter. As of today, the simple possession of a personally manufactured firearm or frame or receiver is a crime. And while the gun grabbers at the AG’s office are misrepresenting the law they are pushing, we see no road for compliance.
“If you own a ghost gun as of September 1st, it’s required to have a serial number on it,” said Michael Kron, the special counsel for Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum’s office….
Kron said the Oregon ghost gun law does not actually ban people from assembling their own guns at home. They just need to be officially serialized after they’re made.
But wait a minute. Amie Wexler, Oregon chapter lead for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America said:
“When Governor Kotek signed the bill, it immediately made it illegal for people to transport or sell or transfer these type of unserialized weapons. But now it’s actually also illegal to own the parts in your own home without taking them to your local gun dealer and getting them serialized.”
If it’s illegal to own or make any firearm, frame, or receiver without a serial number then you are already a criminal when you attempt to have the item serialized, if you can even find someone to do it. So the AG’s position that the “Oregon ghost gun law does not actually ban people from assembling their own guns at home” is clearly BS.
In response to an email from KGW, we explained this but as of now they have seen no reason to report it.
As you know, a Judge in Portland denied our request for an injunction against this latest unconstitutional ban. She, like so many other judges across the country, chose to misapply or ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court for 2nd Amendment cases. The game these judges are playing from coast to coast is to either pretend that whatever is being banned is not an “arm” and therefor is not protected, or to claim that they are “not in common use for self defense.” But while pivotal cases did refer to “self defense” at no time was the intention to limit the right to own an “arm” strictly for self defense. Something the judge in our case pointedly chose to ignore.
This dishonest approach means virtually anything can be banned if our side cannot produce an extensive list of self defense uses of the item being banned. So not only can any single firearm or component be banned in the absence of a long list of recorded self defense uses, any new innovation can be banned simply because it has not existed long enough to be in “common use.”
In the case of personally made firearms, not only do they use this bogus policy to imply they have no legitimate use, but they also conflate the crappy data the ATF supplies concerning conventional firearms that had their serial numbers removed with actual personally made firearms.
Furthermore, to justify this attack on your rights and privacy they drag out this nonsense:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, “From 2016 through 2021, there were approximately 45,240 suspected privately made firearms reported to ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement from potential crime scenes, including 692 homicides or attempted homicides.”
“Suspected privately made firearms” from “potential crime scenes.” Ok got it.
The left continues to claim that personally made firearms can be banned because they are used in crimes. So anything anyone uses in a crime is fair game for banning. They claim they are “dangerous and unusual “ so they can be banned. All firearms are dangerous and “unusual” is clearly in the eye of whomever is pushing the ban.
All of this idiocy could have been stopped if the Republicans we elected to protect our rights actually did that. But in Oregon the few who stood up in the Senate were sold down their river by their “leader” and cannot run for their seats again. The entire House Republican Caucus rolled over and refused to stop this when they could have at no cost to themselves.
It is clear that there is very little chance that we are going to make changes in the legislature when the people on “our side” are more interested in sending out an endless stream of fundraising mail disguised as petitions and surveys than in actually doing anything. That leaves us in expensive court battles where the Judges are virtually all anti-gun political appointees. It’s the worst of all possible situations but it’s what we have.
OFF, along with other great pro-rights organizations like Firearms Policy Coalition will continue to fight as long as we have your support.
Please consider donating to these important battles. You can make a secure online donation here: https://oregonfirearms.ejoinme.org/MyPages/DonationPage/tabid/70447/Default.aspx
Thank you.