Bloomberg Steamrolls Oregon

By Jeff Knox

(May 15, 2015) After dumping millions of dollars into political campaigns and misleading advertisements, Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety managed to eke out a victory in Oregon last week.  By the thinnest of party-line majorities, the Oregon State House passed a bill criminalizing firearm transfers between private citizens, requiring that any transfer must go through federally licensed firearm dealers, requiring paperwork, submission to a background check, and incurring additional costs for the buyer.

The law is so stringently worded that even leaving a gun with your wife’s best friend when she’s house-sitting for you, or holding onto your buddy’s guns when he’s on deployment with the military would make you – and them – criminals, if you didn’t first take all of the guns down to a dealer, fill out paperwork on all of them, and have the transferee pass a background check.  That paperwork, with identifying information for all of the guns, and both individuals involved, would then be available to law enforcement and bureaucrats, and could be used to track down the owners of any guns that might be banned at some point in the future.

Last year Bloomberg and his friends spent well over $10 million to get a similar bill passed in Washington State through a voter initiative, and they spent several hundred thousand more getting an almost identical initiative qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada.  Residents of that state can expect to see a multi-million dollar Bloomberg campaign telling them that the measure is “merely” a background check bill intended to “keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”  They will claim, as they did in Washington and Oregon, that the law will save lives, and they will make it sound like a simple and effective way to keep guns away from dangerous criminals.  All of that will be lies and distortion.

 The truth is, the laws are complex and unenforceable.  They create significant difficulties and liabilities for many gun owners, result in a de facto registration system, and do nothing to deny access to firearms by criminals and crazy people.  There is no solid evidence that the current background checks performed whenever a gun is purchased from a licensed dealer have had any effect on criminal misuse of firearms, and there is no reason to expect that expanding them to include private transfers will have any impact at all – at least not on crime and criminal misuse of guns.  Remember that the shooters of Gabby Giffords, Virginia Tech, the Batman movie, Santa Barbara, and just about any other high-profile attack you can think of, passed background checks.  The few who didn’t either stole the guns or got them with the help of straw purchasers.  What these expanded laws will do is make a lot of regular people criminals for doing things they’ve done for decades.

Bloomberg’s minions have already established an office in my home state of Arizona where they are planning to soon begin gathering signatures to try and put this type of legislation on the ballot here as well.

Strange bedfellows…

One of the interesting aspects of the Nevada petition drive, was that signature gatherers being paid with Bloomberg money were also collecting signatures for an initiative to legalize sale and possession of marijuana for adults.  I obtained a copy of one of the door-to-door solicitors’ scripts which first invited prospects to sign the Bloomberg gun control petition, then transitioned into inviting them to sign the marijuana legalization petition.

I found this peculiar since Bloomberg is an outspoken opponent of any sort of legalization of marijuana, and marijuana use is a prohibiting factor for firearm possession.  Someone signing both petitions might help gain legal access to marijuana, but would also be adding a layer of roadblocks to his own access to firearms for protection.

In Arizona, a group recently began collecting signatures to get a recreational marijuana legalization initiative put on the ballot here next year.  Will we be seeing the same sort of cooperative effort between the pot people – who despise Bloomberg, and the Bloombergians – whose boss is an outspoken opponent of marijuana legalization?  Only time will tell, but it seems likely since there are only a couple of companies that specialize in paid signature gatherers, and they tend to sub-contract with each other.  Unless the pot people get a guarantee that the company they use won’t allow Bloomberg to piggyback on their efforts, or Bloomberg demands that his petitions not be circulated along with the marijuana legalization petition.  Either making such demands would probably have to pay a premium for the exclusivity, so there’s a good chance that we will again see enemies working together at crossed purposes.

Meanwhile, the Brady Campaign, another gun control group which has been in the fight under various names for decades longer than Bloomberg, just sent out a fundraising appeal claiming the “victory” in Oregon as their own.  There have been several instances of conflict between the Brady Bunch and the Bloomies since Mike started building his rights-restriction conglomerate.  The Brady Bunch have accused the Bloomies of hijacking their ideas, stealing their celebrities, and coopting their pet politicians, while the Bloomies have given the Brady Campaign short shrift, snubbing them at events, and arrogantly dismissing their complaints.

Brady President, Dan Gross, claiming credit for the legislation passed in Oregon, with no mention of the millions spent by Bloomberg’s machine, can’t be helpful to the spirit of cooperation.  I suspect it won’t be long until the Brady Bunch will either go belly-up or become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, Inc.