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 On January 2, 2025 the first section of the bill would be repealed.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

The original one page of SB 348 has been amended with a 64 page amendment.

The first paragraph changes the purpose of SB 348. The second paragraph deletes all of the original text of the bill.

Welcome to politics.

Notice that they are declaring an emergency. What is the emergency? If one were to guess it is that Bruen threatens their little tyrannical hearts. I’d say “souls” but they might have sold them to the Devil sometime in the past.

Origin Changes

Measure 114 is just that, a “Measure” put forth by the people. It was done as a Measure because the infringers in the legislature couldn’t get enough votes to do it on their own.

Because it was a “Measure” and it is now being modified by the Legislature they amendment is filing off the fingerprints of “Measure” and replacing them Legislative markings. The following is just one such example:

Text in italics are deletions. Text in bold are inserted. Text in normal is what was there originally.

So you can see that this change does nothing but replace the language that said this was done by the people of the state of Oregon and replaces it with standard legislative text.

Language Corrections

When I originally read Measure 114 I noticed that it has language that wasn’t normalized. It was obvious to me that it had not going through the standard editing that normal bills did. Throughout this amendment they are correcting that sort of non-standard language.

Example: …has the [same meaning given to this] meaning given that term in ORS 166.432[(1)(a) to (e)]— Id. at P. 2

There are also things like changing “Agent” to “agent” which are just grammatical changes.

Finally there is text that is removed because it has implications for other parts of statute. For example they removed “, or their designees”. The text they removed is understood currently to be what is meant when a person is tasked by title to do something. That person can designate an subordinate to do the work with the final result submitted over that person’s signature. I.e. the sheriff is tasked to do something and can tell one of his deputies to do the actual work.

By explicitly saying that in Measure 114 they open the rest of statute to reinterpretation. “If the statute at Section 3, chapter 1 explicitly says “or their designees” this means that the legislature is restricting the task to only the person or people explicitly listed in law. If they intended this to be those listed people and their designees they would have said so in statute.” It might also be some sort of thing where as originally written in Measure 114, the listed person could assign the task to somebody outside of their organization.

Operative Changes

They have changed the bill from a “permit to purchase” to a “permit to purchase or acquire”. Id. at P. 2 This means there would be de facto gun registration for any gone that is ever transferred.

Such permits will not be granted to persons under the age of 21.

It requires the “agent” to “Immediately” enter the applicant’s name into the database as requesting government permission to exercise a core civil right, once the agent “accepts” an application.

They exempt background check information from FOIA requests or any public disclosures.

They strengthened the reporting language and set time limits for reporting. Not to the applicant, but to the state. They also want and added “support the consistent and equitable” language requiring the collection of race and gender information. Notice the new language. I feel sorry for the poor programmer that has to go from “male”, “female”, “other” to “free form text”

They gave the state 30 more days to respond after verification of identity. So the slow process just got 30 days slower.

The increased all the fees.

Having stated that this is a “permit to purchase or acquire” they then leave all the “permit-to-purchase” name throughout the rest of the law. This means that unless you catch that single line you don’t know that this applies to “acquire” as well as purchase.

They added a bunch of exemptions for training for those special people.

They gave themselves more time in telling people they had been denied and extended the wait until an applicant can start trying to figure out what is happening with their application.

Of course they got push back from (un)civil servants that they, the servants, could be held liable for infringing on the core civil rights of The People. So they added protective language for the petty tyrants implementing this law:

Lovely bit of language in the original. The original says that if an applicant asks for a judicial review of the outcome the judge has to follow the same guidelines as the agent did in denying the application in the first place. Unless the judge things relief should be granted in the interest of justice—Id. at P. 12 That sounds an awful lot like the state telling the justice system that it is ok to discriminate for the “oppressed” in the “interest of justice”.

The moved the implementation date to July 1, 2024.

Here is a nice gotcha… The state doesn’t seem to have a time limit on how long it takes to get an approval back to the FFL. In addition, the law still requires an approval before transfer, so delayed means no transfer. The gotcha is that you only have 72 hours to pick up your firearm after it has been approved.

That would be a pain for people like me that have to travel to the LGS. Since it is given in hours instead of business days I could easily see approvals being given on Monday morning at 0700. My LGS doesn’t open until 1000 and closes at 1730. Most weeks I can’t make it out to the LGS in that time frame. I have to wait until the weekend.

It looks like the permit to purchase has a carve out for Law Enforcement and active duty military. I don’t get that they are letting active duty military buy without a permit to purchase, but it is there.

They are also saying that single shot, double barreled shotguns, bolt, lever, pump, straight-pull and revolving actions, tube feed .22 rimfire, muzzleloaders, break action shotguns are all exempt from permit to purchase.

Another “we let you keep some of your core civil right so go away”

In 2026 the exemptions by firearm type go away.

It’s an Emergency!!!!!

The amended bill says that the law is needed “immediate[ly]” to preserve public peace, health and safety. So it is an emergency and the bill goes into effect the minute the governor signs it.

Conclusion

It looks like some of the changes in this amendment are designed to moot current court cases. I’ve not verified that. Regardless, it is still a shit fest.