B.L.U.F. An example of winning in court. Oregon’s legislature rushes to moot cases and to fix parts of Measure 114.

H/T Bh.Z and OFF

On January 9th, 2023 Senate Bill 348 was introduced. The bill was short. It was a bill giving the Oregon Department of Justice a requirement to …study ways to address the unlawful possession of firearms.— Senate Bill 348. The DoJ was given until December 31,2024 to provide the report back to the legislature. On January 2, 2025 the first section of the bill would be repealed.

On its face this doesn’t sound all that bad, directing some government entity to do a study is a way of spending taxpayer money to get “facts” to use against The People in infringement cases, but better a study than another infringement.

Oregon Firearms Federation sent an alert telling its members that this was a bill to observe as it was likely there as a gut and stuff bill. Often times a legislature has rules to protect The People from the state. Things like a bill must be read 3 times before it can be voted on. That there must be a certain amount of time between readings. That the bill has to be analyzed by the appropriate committees to make sure it will be “legal”.

But there is an important part of these rules to remember, amendments are not subject to the same rules. The idea being that members have had enough time to analyze the bill and are not going to propose “fixes” and “changes” to make the bill better. When those amendments are presented the body votes and if the amendment gets enough votes the amendment is applied to the bill.

If the bill is in both chambers of a bicameral legislature there will be a reconciliation phase that takes place if the two bills are actually different. If both the Senate and the House versions are the same then it is deemed to have been reconciled and it moves forward to the Governor or President for signature to turn the bill into a law.

A “gut and stuff” bill is a bill that is specifically designed for this amendment process. When the bill is read an amendment is offered that “guts” the entire text of the bill and then “stuffs” entirely new content in place of the original text. Suddenly you have a bill with the same identifiers that has been through the pre-vote approval process with totally new content ready for a vote.

This is where the famous Nancy statement comes from “We have to pass the bill to see what is in it.” The bill in question then was ObamaCare and it was gut and stuffed into an entirely different bill with a short timeline to a vote. With 2000+ pages of new text it was impossible for any one person toi read the entire bill before the vote.

In infringement bills it is often the case that they legislature doesn’t want The People to have time to react.

The watchers have to spot the bill. They have to see the amendment go into place. They have to craft an alert. The alert has to make it to The People and only then can The People respond with email, calls and faxes.

In person responses take even long. This is why the NYS S.A.F.E act was so bad on a procedural level. Even though there are laws in place to give people time to respond, the infringers got it passed in an emergency session before those alerts and responses could take place.

With the NYS CCIA the republicans only had the press release until the very last minute. It wasn’t possible to respond until they got the text of the bill and they didn’t get the text until the last minute.

Oregon Senate Bill 348 – Amended

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Matt is out there fighting for the safety of the people of New Jersey. You know this because Louis tells you so. But it is fun to look some of the fun things he has to say Here in New Jersey, we have the fourth-strongest gun laws in the country. We also have the third-lowest rate of firearm deaths in the country and the lowest rate of firearm ownership with just 8.9% of New Jersey households reporting to own firearms. Id.

Is he proud his state has some of the worse gun right infringements in the country. He is proud of the infringements in the concealed carry permitting. He is proud of the infringements on individuals making firearms. He is proud of the infringements on people right to purchase firearms without permission. He is proud of being a tyrant.

But he is very upset that some people aren’t taking a knee to these infringements. Unfortunately, this was almost instantly challenged by gun-rights groups who claimed the law was unconstitutional because it violated the Second Amendment. id.. Yep, you read that right, they claim it was an infringement, not that it was.

And it just gets worse for him. To add insult to injury, the Supreme Court ruled in June that the Constitution provides a right to carry a gun outside the home Id. How horrible it is that the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Bruen that Heller is still good law and that if it is an arm in common use it is covered by the Second Amendment and if it is even a little infringement it is too much.

So Louis doesn’t get to have Matt go to the courts and whine that his law should make people safer so it should pass constitutional muster.

But let’s take a look at some of Louis’s claims, that New Jersey is somehow special in the reduction of violent crimes. Of course he might be cherry picking to just crimes committed with firearms:

Every statistic tracked in violent crime in the FBI’s UCR shows that crime is decreasing. That might be meaningful.
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When looking at Boland v. Bonta, the “Unsafe Handgun Act” out of California, it was nice that the judge “got it right”.

Unfortunately the reasoning that he had in his opinion niggled at me. There was something wrong. It should have been this hard.

Then Mark Smith applied the clue-by-four and it made things obvious.

The UHA is a gun ban. Full Stop.

Consider a law that said “A firearm with a barleycorn front sight is banned” We would instantly recognize that as a gun ban. If it is a gun ban then the plain text of the Second Amendment is touched on and it then the state must prove that there is a history and tradition of regulating classes of guns with particular features.

When the feature was “pistol” then Heller found that a ban was Unconstitutional. The holdings of the Supreme Court have shown that it doesn’t have to be a complete ban, it only has to touch the plain text of the second amendment in order for regulation to be presumptively unconstitutional. It is up to the state to prove history and tradition.

But what if we turned the statement around? What if we said “Any firearm without a barleycorn front sight is banned”. This is still a ban, the state has just inverted the logic from “can’t have” to “must have”. It is a ban. Treat it like a ban in court.

Now if the state chooses to hide that ban inside a bunch of other regulations, it might be harder to see.

For example what if the law said “you can only buy firearms on this list” and “We are only going to put firearms with barleycorn front sights on the list”. It is still a ban, it is just a two step process.

Think of it the same way we think of machine guns. According to the law, machine guns are not banned. You are free to buy them if you can find somebody willing to sell them to you. All you need is to jump through NFA hoops.

But because of the Hughes amendment no NEW machine guns have been added to the transferable NFA list. This has caused the cost/value of machine guns to sky rocket.

I don’t think any gun infringer really wants to be told that the difference between an AR-15 and a M-16 is $75 in parts and an extra hole. Which means that the cost of a machine gun should be about the same as its semi-auto version.

The closing of the NFA registry for machine guns is a ban on machine guns.

The UHA is also a ban. No matter how much lipstick is slapped on that pig, it is still and always will be a gun ban.

Everything in this article that is not a quote is my understanding. I AM NOT A LAWYER so the odds of me getting something wrong is non-zero.

In Boland v. Bonta: Another District Court Win “UHA” I quoted and wrote.

I should have spent some more time figuring out what this all means.

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It was great to see so many of you have been advocates for the Second Amendment. More of you have testified than I expected to see.

Thanks to all of you that fight the good fight.

We had a couple of articles this week that were not authored by your normal hosts. Thank you to SkinnedKnuckles for his article about working to get an actual firearm safety program started in the local school system.

The other outside article was the blurb from Michel Associates, PC. That was more interesting to me. I had reached out to the helpdesk at the firm and expected to end up communicating with some public relations person. To have the first response come from the senior partner was shocking to me.

Is it of interest to you to get short articles about groups and firms that are fighting for the Second?

The Second Circuit court hard oral arguments on 5 Second Amendment cases on Monday. We are now in a wait and see holding pattern. We can make a couple of different assumptions about the judges, they could all be anti-gun, they could all be pro-gun, they could just be ignorant, or they could just be following the law.

If they are anti-gun they are going to ask if it is in the best interest of the infringers to find for the state or the plaintiffs. If they find for the state the plaintiffs will appeal to the Supreme Court and that would be bad for gun rights infringers. If they find for the plaintiffs the state might not appeal but might instead change the law to require a relitigation.

If they are anti-gun rights I can almost bet that it will take a long time for them to reach an opinion.

If they are pro-gun or just following the law they will find for the plaintiffs and the state will have to decide if they want to play in the Supreme Court, again, after just being slapped down in Bruen.

If they are ignorant, we are going to end up with case law that is going to be hard to deal with. This might be the worse case.

Thank you once again to all of our readers and thank you to all the people that found the article like button.

We are the children of the “right now” age. I am old. I remember my mother going to the Grayhound bus depot and paying them to deliver two huge boxes to her hometown in the midwest. This was the only way to get a package that big that far in a reasonable amount of time.

Reasonable amount of time? About a week or so. At which point my grandparents would go to the bus depot to get pick up the packages.

When I was a child working on motorcycles I would create a parts list and then once a month we would go into the big city and I could purchase parts at the motorcycle dealership(s).

We would dig through our Scholastic book pamphlet and pick out the books we wanted. Three or four weeks later our books would arrive. We’d look though the Sear’s catalog and place an order. A few weeks later it would arrive.

The other day I needed replacement “Plackers”. I spent less than two minutes online to locate what I wanted, purchased more for much less than I could locally and they were delivered as soon as we had cleared our driveway.

Everything today happens quickly. I can send an email around the world in less time than it takes to print that same letter. I can have a response back before I close my email program.

My introduction to The Internet was when I noticed that if we dropped UUCP messages in one node in Michigan it would show up in California with a timestamp only seconds different than the arrival time.

We are spoiled. Everything should be moving as fast as online shopping and online communications.

Not everything is fast

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The following is taken from an announcement from the SAF
H/T to B.Zh