OFF ALERT 04.15.13
Happy Tax Day.
This is the day Bill Clinton urged us to make our “patriotic contributions.” But tomorrow is the day that Senate Judiciary Chairman Floyd Prozanski will attempt to advance his attacks on gun rights.
Tomorrow, “work sessions” are scheduled for Senate Bills 347,699, 700 and 796. Each of these bills attack legitimate gun owners while ignoring criminals and madmen. Each is designed to harass the law abiding.
Since all of these bills have already received “public hearings” no public testimony will be taken at the “work session.” Of course, these bills are likely to be changed dramatically at the work session so the “public testimony” previously taken will not reflect what will likely be in these bills. But if these bills are voted on tomorrow, there will be no opportunity for the public to comment on what they have become before a vote in committee. That’s the way it works in Salem.
The reason we were told these bills were moved back to tomorrow was to allow time for amendments to be drafted. As of today, Monday afternoon, those amendments were still not available to the public or presumably to the Republican members of the committee.
Should these bills actually be dealt with tomorrow, most of the people voting on them will have had virtually no time to review the amendments. And you the public will have literally no time to review them until after the vote in committee.
There is still time to contact the members of the Senate Judiciary and express your opposition to these very bad bills. They can be reached here.
For more info and talking points on these bills, please use this link.
Please note, the starting time for this work session has changed from 8AM to 8:30 AM. This is significant since numerous bills have been added to the schedule and, as of now, the gun bills are scheduled to be dealt with last. This means that it is entirely possible that they won’t be dealt with tomorrow. There is no way to predict this.
Since there is no opportunity for public input, you may want to consider just watching the event online.
You can do that at the following link.
You’ll want to tune into Room 343.
Don’t forget that on Wednesday, the same committee is due to have public hearings on two gun related bills, SB 696 and 713. For more information on changes coming to SB 696 please see this alert.
We have no idea what they are planning for SB 713 which would extend the places a “firearms training facility” could be located.
Stay tuned.