Confiscation: New Initiative Would Require Gun Owners to Turn in Their Weapons
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For American gun grabbers, the mask is coming off.
Gun control activists generally swear they respect the Constitution and really have no wish to confiscate legal weapons owned by law-abiding Americans, but a ballot initiative in the works in Oregon is showing that to be the lie that it really is.
And any supporter of the Second Amendment should be furious.
The measure is known as Oregon Initiative 43, and organizers are currently in the process of gathering 88,000 signatures by July 6 to get it on the ballot, according to the Statesman Journal of Salem.
If it gets on the ballot, and if it passes, not only would the sale of firearms liberals consider to be “assault rifles” be prohibited, but Oregon residents who own such a firearm will be required to surrender the weapon to the state, sell it “or render it inoperable, within 120 days of passage,” according to the Statesman Journal.
Violation would be a Class B felony, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison under Oregon law.
Anyone who wanted to maintain possession of the weapon in working order would be required to register with the state and undergo a background check. They would they be – theoretically – permitted to keep the weapon, at least until the next time fear-mongering liberals stir up another voter initiative to actually confiscate the guns.
And then authorities will conveniently know exactly where to look.
As a matter of law and politics, the confiscation idea is crazy, as one Republican lawmaker told the Statesman Journal.
“This is completely out of hand — I couldn’t believe it,” Oregon state Rep. Bill Post said. “I’ve been told so many times by people in favor of gun control: ‘no one is coming to take your guns.’ This explicitly comes for your guns.”
As a matter of reality, the initiative has problems, too, Bearing Arms writer Tom Knighton pointed out.
Like every other gun control measure, it would only affect the law-abiding citizens, so criminals would just keep being criminals. That’s a standard flaw in the gun grabbing argument, and one that gun control proponents can’t answer. But this initiative is even worse in its ignorance.
“Another issue is that it also calls for registration of high capacity magazines,” Knighton wrote. “This is what happens when people who know nothing about guns try to legislate about guns.
“You see, for those playing at home, magazines don’t have unique serial numbers. That means registering them will be next to impossible if for no other reason than the fact there’s nothing to tell which magazine is which. Even the military, who wants to account for virtually everything, doesn’t serialize magazines because it’s impractical.”
But those are questions of logic that the emotion-driven gun control groups don’t bother to take into account.
Since the Feb. 14 shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the country has been gripped by what can only be described as a manipulated hysteria when it comes to guns.
Oregon had its own bout of anti-gun histeria back in 2015, after nine people were killed at the campus of Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Oregon, by a gunman who eventually killed himself. This Oregon initiative, spearheaded by a Lutheran pastor and a rabbi, is just the latest example — if an extreme one.
The good news here is that what remains of sanity in the Democrat Party these days isn’t championing such an idiotic bill — at least so far.
“This got zero comment or help from anybody in Oregon’s Democratic leadership,” Post, the Republican lawmaker, told the Statesman Journal. “The reason they’re not supporting this is that they’re not stupid. They know this would bring out the greatest red wave of votes in Oregon history.”
That might be good for Republicans in Oregon. It would be better for the country if it never even got that far.
But at least the mask is coming off the gun control groups now.
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