House Democrats Pass 3 Anti-Gun Bills
House Democrats approved of three anti-gun bills this week which State Representative Dean Urdahl says will do more to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens than crack down on violent criminals. The three bills include new laws on storage, requirements for reporting stolen firearms, and a new “trigger activator” definition that may render some commonly used guns illegal.
Urdahl says the bill regarding reporting stolen firearms wrongly criminalizes a victim of a crime if they do not report a firearm theft within a government-prescribed period of time. He says the problem with these bills is they will have very negligible impacts in terms of cracking down on the real bad actors who are committing violent crimes.
Urdahl says, in fact, these bills could do more to endanger law-abiding gun owners who respect and honor the Second Amendment by placing unnecessary restrictions on them that make it harder to defend themselves. He says a better approach would be for our state to step up efforts to enforce existing laws, with prosecutors who are willing to fully charge violent criminals and courts that stop turning dangerous people back out on the street with a slap on the wrist.
Urdahl says he doesn’t see how we make any progress on violent crime until we start doing more to enforce our existing laws. He says the bill to stiffen penalties on straw purchasers borrows language authored by House Republicans and that’s something he supports; unfortunately, there also is unrelated language in that bill that is controversial and undermined bipartisan support.
He says after passing the House mainly along party lines, the three bills are now in the hands of the Senate, where Democrats have a one-seat majority.
Urdahl says that means a senator who currently faces first-degree felony burglary charges could cast deciding votes on bills undermining people’s ability to defend themselves during a home invasion. He says these latest proposals follow last year’s changes Democrats enacted regarding universal background checks and red flag confiscation orders.