A report by Oregon Public Broadcasting may have opened some eyes—albeit too late—to the futility of passing ever-more-restrictive gun control measures, as the story includes a quote from Paul Donheffner, legislative committee chair of the Oregon Hunters Association, which opposed recently-passed anti-gun Measure 114.
“It is going to put a lot of honest citizens through the wringer,” Donheffner said. “The people that are committing gun violence aren’t going to get a [permit to purchase], you’re not going to get a background check, you’re not going to go through all this rigmarole.”
Measure 114 will require training and a police-issued permit (neither of which will be available when the initiative takes effect, thus effectively cancelling out the Second Amendment and Article I, Section 27 of the Oregon State Constitution) in order to purchase a firearm. The Second Amendment Foundation is currently preparing a legal challenge.
Critics of the legislation concur with Donheffner’s observation. It will not prevent any crimes and it will only inconvenience law-abiding citizens.
There may be no better example of gun control failure than Chicago, where the weekend saw “dozens of people shot,” according to Fox News. Among the victims was a 12-year-old girl shot in the neck during a drive-by, and a 64-year-old man killed during an attempted supermarket holdup.
The Windy City has some of the most restrictive gun control laws, and it also has a body count of at least 580 people killed by gunfire out of the 640 homicides so far this year, according to the popular website, heyjackass.com.
All of this provides a contrast to a weekend Op-Ed piece posted by NBC News touting the promise of Oregon’s anti-gun-rights measure. Authors Ari Davis, policy advisor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, and Lisa Geller, state affairs advisor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, assert Measure 114’s licensing requirement for gun purchases will prevent “many dangerous people from purchasing guns and deters gun straw purchases carried out in order to traffic guns to criminal networks.”
That’s assuming criminals go through the process to get their hands on guns, which Donheffner said emphatically is not going to happen.
And the Oregon Firearms Federation weighed in Monday with an email message stating, “114 is clearly unconstitutional. Of that there is little doubt. It’s just a matter of whether or not the courts can read the simple language of both the Oregon and United States Constitutions and the recent Supreme Court decision in New York.”
The Federation announced the “Oregon Firearms Educational Foundation will use every resource at our disposal to overturn this mean spirited, evil attack on our rights in court.”
At least three county sheriffs in Oregon have already announced they will not enforce a tenet of the new law which bans so-called “large capacity magazines” capable of holding more than ten cartridges.
This all translates to a legal donnybrook brewing south of the Columbia River, which will be played out in federal court.
In the meantime, however, true believers in gun control will continue pressing for increasing restrictions which only seem to affect law-abiding citizens, claiming that studies show more restrictive laws lower the violent crime rates.
