Oregon’s Mess of a Gun Law

O regon, a state that countless children of the ’80s learned about from the popular Oregon Trail computer game, today expresses its pioneer heritage primarily by settling the wild frontier of terrible — and badly implemented — progressive policies. Its most recent expedition: making a mess of the state’s gun laws.

Last month, Oregon voters narrowly approved (50.76 percent to 49.24 percent, a margin of 28,559 votes out of 1,889,351 votes cast) Ballot Measure 114, which criminalizes the sale and possession of ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds and requires a would-be firearm purchaser to take a gun-safety course and apply and pay for a permit from their local law-enforcement agency. The law was set to take effect December 8, just one month after Election Day, but an Oregon State court judge granted opponents a temporary restraining order, halting enforcement of the law at least until a hearing, which is scheduled for today.

The state-court order joins one issued from the federal court in Oregon, the latter of which halted implementation of the permitting requirement of the law for 30 days, but is allowing the remainder to go into effect. In the event that the state court declines to issue a preliminary injunction against the law following today’s hearing, the federal court order would still bar implementation of the permitting provisions until early January.

Clear as mud? Oregonians can thank the drafters of Measure 114 and the out-of-state billionaires and anti-gun activist groups for this unconstitutional, procedural, and administrative mess. The most imminent problem with Measure 114 is that Oregon’s state and local government are in no position to implement it on its own terms. A week before the supposed implementation date, Oregon police chiefs and sheriffs told a federal judge that they could not issue permits as required by the deadline, because they lacked the infrastructure and staff to review applications. Measure 114 provided no funding for staff or software to help local law-enforcement agencies with the entirely new obligation of processing thousands of background checks. Moreover, there are no programs in the state that provide the specific types of firearm training required by the measure.

The Oregon Department of Justice, which had previously reassured the court and the public that law-enforcement agencies would be prepared to process applications by December 8, changed its tune just prior to the federal court hearing, asking the court to delay implementation for two months to allow Oregon State Police and local law-enforcement agencies to establish training and permitting processes.

Implementation of Measure 114 as written — even now or going forward — would result in a de facto ban on procuring firearms in Oregon.

This is almost certainly unconstitutional, and it was also imminently foreseeable. Local law-enforcement agencies indicated that they lacked the resources to implement the measure before the election. The Oregon State Sheriffs Association estimated that performing Measure 114 background checks would cost local law-enforcement agencies $49 million per year, with only about $19 million covered by permitting fees. This while Portland, the state’s largest and most dysfunctional city, approaches yet another homicide record, and law-enforcement agencies across the state struggle to attract much-needed officers to perform basic law-enforcement duties.

Even if and when Measure 114’s background check and permit requirement become logistically and constitutionally feasible, its limit on magazine capacity may never be. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has confirmed that Americans have an individual constitutional right to keep and bear arms (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008) rooted in the “text, history and tradition” of the Second Amendment (New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, 2022). Oregon’s new magazine-capacity limit, along with similar limits in other states, may soon fall victim to the Court’s reinvigoration of Second Amendment jurisprudence.

It also bears noting that political action committees supporting Measure 114 received $2.93 million in contributions. In comparison, the committees opposing Measure 114 raised just $173,000, a mere 6 percent of that raised by the proponents. The opponents’ largest contributor was the Oregon Firearms Federation PAC, i.e. the allegedly deep-pocketed and all-powerful “gun lobby,” which donated $31,000.

Oregon’s elected officials have generated plenty of bad and wasteful public policy in recent years. They certainly do not need the assistance of outside activist groups and rich progressives to make a mess of things. Yet, that is what has happened with Measure 114.

Oregonians, sick of rising crime and desperate to reverse the harm done to public safety by the defund-the-police ethos that seized much of the state in 2020, now must reckon with an exceedingly costly, unconstitutional mess of a gun law. Such is the price of living on the progressive frontier.