Kooky Legislative Proposal Appears to have been Drafted by Clowns
In the “Old West,” hucksters prided themselves on being able to sell useless “bottles of nothing” to ignorant rubes. But it would take a world-class rube to fall for Michael Bloomberg’s Senate Bill 941, a buffoonish bill being hocked in the Oregon Senate, but chock-full of laughable errors and clownish mistakes.
To begin with, every time you hand a gun to another person for any reason, even for ten seconds, this goofball bill would appear to require a Brady Check.
Here’s why: The bill, in section 2, requires a Brady Check for any “delivery of a firearm from a transferor to a transferee.” “Delivery” includes all loans and leases, but the definition (“not limited to”) is completely open-ended. And “delivery” is a legal term which effectively includes any hand-off.
Think there are exceptions for the shooting range, hunting, etc.? Think again.
For any of these exceptions to apply — hunting, shooting, firearms repair, protection of your family — you have to have “NO reason to believe the transferee is prohibited from possessing a firearm” … NONE WHATSOEVER.
Even the craziest version of this statute being foisted in other states requires, at least, negligence. Bloomberg’s Oregon draft would put gun owners in prison if there were any reason at all for believing the guy you are handing your gun to is prohibited from taking it, however crazy the reason.
Just to give you an example, federal law prohibits you from possessing a gun if you are “addicted to” or “an unlawful user of” any controlled substance — including marijuana [18 USC 922(d)(3) and (g)(3)]. Are you willing to bet a few years in prison that your neighbor has never smoked a joint? Are you willing to take that gamble and hand him a gun for him to look at — even for 10 seconds?
Not only that, if your neighbor has ever smoked pot, it’s still a crime for him to take your gun and save your life — even if there is an armed intruder in your home who is attacking you.
Or, consider the fact that tens of thousands of military veterans (suffering from PTSD) have been deemed as prohibited persons in this country. So, to put this whole problem in perspective, if your neighbor is a veteran and he comes over to your house, he can’t handle your new gun for even a second. Why? Because you cannot claim that you have “no reason” to believe your neighbor might be a prohibited person.
In other words, a person doesn’t have to be a prohibited person to make it illegal for you to transfer a firearm to them. You only have to have a “reason to believe” they might be a prohibited person — no matter how far-fetched that reason might be.
But even if the Oregon version had not been drafted by feckless clowns, the whole concept behind Bloomberg’s universal background check proposals has a lot of problems.
To begin with, most of Oregon is not densely populated. But, even if you live far away from a populated place, if you want to sell your gun to your next-door neighbor, whom you’ve know all your life, you have to take a day off of work, drive with your neighbor to the nearest FFL, pay whatever fee the FFL chooses to charge, and hope that you are not one of the 8% of all Brady Law transactions who get either a “false red” or a “false yellow.” If either of these happens, perhaps because your neighbor’s name resembles someone else’s, your neighbor can pretty well give up any hope of ever purchasing a gun again in Oregon.
And then there is the problem of ATF’s de facto national gun registry. Increasingly, that agency is going into gun dealers and demanding to copy many or all of the dealer’s 4473’s in computer-readable form. ATF will claim this is not a “registry,” for roughly the same reason that the devil doesn’t use the word “sin.” But the bottom line is that, if every gun purchaser has a 4473 because every gun purchaser has to go through a Brady Check, then every gun owner will be entered into the registry.
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/bloomberg-tries-to-buy-oregon-and-expand-his-gun-control-web/127964#more-127964
