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Citizens' ballot initiative on Ethics Changes contains anti-gun provisions

utbagpiper

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All, the following is from GOUtah!. Please read, consider, forward to like minded individuals, and then act upon this alert.

Thank You.

Charles

GOUtah!

(Gun Owners of Utah)

http://www.goutahorg.org

Utah's Uncompromising Independent Gun Rights Network.

No Surrender. No Retreat. Not Now. Not Ever.


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____________________________________


GOUtah! Alert #323 – 14 December 2009


Today’s Maxim of Liberty:

"When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain,
the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor
of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most
effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly,
but weaken them, and let them sink gradually…”

-- George Mason


GOUtah! FINDS GUN-REGISTRATION CLAUSE IN EHTICS-REFORM BALLOT
INITIATIVE

A group calling itself “Utahns for Ethical Government” has sponsored a
citizens’ initiative, which they hope to get on the ballot for the
November 2010 elections. The group is currently gathering signatures
for that purpose. The official name of the initiative is “Government
Ethics Reform”, and the full text can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/ykhc9jk

GOUtah! strongly opposes the Government Ethics Reform initiative and
we encourage gun owners NOT to sign it because we've found that the
text of the initiative contains a de facto gun-registration clause.
We doubt that this clause was intentionally designed to require gun
registration, but that’s exactly what it does. Although this gun-
registration requirement would apply only to members of the state
legislature and their spouses, it would be Utah’s first state gun-
registration law. Furthermore, the full registration information
(including a complete list of each legislator’s firearms, how much
each gun is worth, and where they’re stored) would be made available
to the public.

In addition to GOUtah!’s general opposition to any law that requires a
person to register his firearms with the government, we believe that
this proposed registration/publication requirement could have a
broader impact on gun rights by discouraging gun owners from running
for the legislature in the future and enticing pro-gun legislators
currently in office to resign or retire (given that most pro-gun
legislators are probably gun owners themselves). We urge you to read
our analysis below and to also study the initiative on your own. If,
after doing so, you agree with us that the initiative should be
defeated, we urge you to go to the Action Item at the end of this alert.
The initiative is 21 pages in length, and most of it has little or no
direct bearing on Second-Amendment issues that we can discern.
However, GOUtah! Policy Director Charles Hardy carefully studied the
entire text and discovered the gun-registration requirement mentioned
above. GOUtah! isn’t opposed to ethics reform per se, and we take no
position on the 99% of the initiative that doesn’t have a direct
bearing on gun rights. If this were a regular bill going through the
normal legislative process, multiple opportunities would arise to
strip the anti-gun language out of it by means of amending or
substituting the bill during a committee hearing or floor debate.
However, no such options exist with the citizens’ initiative process.
If the initiative gets enough signatures to make it onto the ballot
and then passes next November, everything in it will automatically
become state law. Thus, the only way to prevent the gun-registration
clause from becoming law is to defeat the initiative.


ANALYSIS OF THE GUN-REGISTRATION CLAUSE

The gun registration requirement in the Government Ethics Reform
Initiative can be found in two portions, both of which are on page
13. The first of these would require every member of the Utah State
Legislature to submit a written “disclosure statement” each year to
the Utah Independent Ethics Commission (a state-level commission that
does not currently exist, but which would be established if the
initiative passes). This disclosure statement would need to include
“the location, nature of, and fair market value of any property, real
or personal, tangible or intangible (other than a primary personal
residence), in which the legislator or spouse, directly or indirectly,
holds an interest which is or is proposed or likely to be the subject
of…. regulation by any public body.”

A firearm constitutes tangible personal property, and private
ownership of a firearm is subject to stringent regulation by the Utah
State Legislature, the Utah Department of Public Safety, the United
States Congress, and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms,
and Explosives (among others), each of which is “a public body.”
Thus, we believe that firearms clearly fit into the category defined
by the initiative. Which means that, if you’re a state legislator,
you and your spouse will have to provide the Ethics Commission with a
written list of all your guns, the estimated value of each gun, and
where each gun is kept. And you’ll have to do this every year.

GOUtah! and most other gun-rights groups have consistently opposed ANY
law that requires ANY citizen to provide ANY government agency with a
list of his privately-owned firearms. ANY such law is a gun-
registration law, pure and simple, even if the text of the law does
not include the words “firearm” or “register”. The portion of the
Government Ethics Reform Initiative described above therefore
qualifies, in our opinion, as a gun-registration law.
But there’s more! The second part of the registration requirement,
also on page 13, says: “The disclosure statements…. contemplated in
this section of this Act shall be accurate and complete; they shall be
signed by legislators under penalty of perjury; and they shall be
available for inspection and copying by any member of the public.”

This means that if you leave one of your guns off of the disclosure
statement, you’ll be guilty of perjury, which is a felony in Utah.
Any felony conviction will permanently strip you of your right to
possess a firearm. What’s even more alarming is that these disclosure
statements will be “available for inspection and copying by any member
of the public.” In other words, if you’re a state legislator, any
burglar or gang member will be able to make a copy of your disclosure
statement, which lists all the firearms owned by you or your spouse,
how much each of your guns is worth, and where they’re stored. Thus
the registration clause of the Ethics Reform Initiative is even worse
than existing gun-registration laws in other states, which at least
keep such information confidential.

Even though this gun-registration law would affect only state
legislators and their spouses, you as a gun owner should be very
concerned. Would you support a gun-registration requirement that
applied only to plumbers or stockbrokers just because you didn’t
happen to be a plumber or a stockbroker? Of course you wouldn’t. An
attack on any one else’s Second-Amendment rights should be regarded as
an attack on your own Second-Amendment rights. As Ben Franklin said,
“we all need to hang together, or else we’ll all hang separately.”

In addition to our opposition to gun registration in general, we also
oppose this registration requirement on practical grounds. If the
Ethics Reform Initiative becomes law, we suspect that the Utah
Legislature will become much less friendly toward gun rights in the
future simply because gun owners will be less likely to run for the
legislature. If you were a state legislator and you and your spouse
kept a dozen guns in your home and several more in your vacation
cabin, would you really want to register your guns and have this
information posted on a government website, where every burglar and
gang member in the state would be able to see it? Probably not.
Furthermore, the media would almost certainly have a field day talking
about your “arsenal”.

We suspect that many pro-gun senators and representatives, regardless
of party affiliation, would choose to retire or resign rather than
have to comply with the registration requirement. In fact, one key
pro-gun legislator has already told GOUtah! that he’ll resign for this
very reason if the initiative passes. And we suspect that fewer gun
owners would run for office in the future. We'd be much worse off
from a gun-rights standpoint if future sessions of the Utah
Legislature had nobody to sponsor pro-gun-rights legislation, and
nobody in key leadership positions to help derail anti-gun bills.
This is not a partisan issue. There are pro-gun-rights legislators
from both of the major political parties (just as there are anti-gun
legislators in both parties). The longtime presence of Mike Dmitrich
(a Democrat who retired from the Senate last year) on the Senate
Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee enabled us
to have several important legislative victories, and his position as
Senate Minority Leader in 2007 and 2008 was a good thing for gun
rights, as is the current position of Mike Waddoups (a Republican) as
Senate Majority Leader. The late Senator Ed Mayne, a Democrat who,
much to our sorrow, died in office last year, was a staunch defender
of gun rights during his legislative career. Rep. Curt Oda (a
Republican) has sponsored several important gun-rights bills and is
vice-chairman of the House committee to which most gun-related bills
get referred. We could go on, but you get the point.
GOUtah! does not endorse any politician or political party, of
course. We’re simply pointing out that if we’re going to protect and
expand the right to keep and bear arms in Utah, we’re going to need
people in the state legislature who are willing to fight for that
right, including people in key leadership positions. The gun-
registration requirement could make this much more difficult to
achieve by discouraging gun owners from running for office.



SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE INITIATIVE

If you’d like to read arguments both for and against the initiative,
here are some useful links. GOUtah! does not endorse of affiliate
with either of the organizations sponsoring these websites. We’re
merely providing these links for informational purposes. You are, of
course, free to make up your own mind on this matter. We can’t tell
you how to think. And it may be that, after reading the entire
initiative, you’ll decide that the other stuff that’s in it is so good
that it more than compensates for the badness of the gun-registration
clause.

Argument in favor of the Ethics Reform Initiative:

http://www.utahnsforethicalgovernment.org/

Argument against the Ethics Reform Initiative:

http://www.unethicalreform.org/


ACTION ITEM

If you’d like to help us prevent the gun registration requirement from
becoming law, we encourage you not to sign the petition to put the
Government Ethics Reform Initiative on the ballot. We also encourage
you to tell your gun-owning friends about the registration clause and
forward this alert to them.

If you already signed the petition prior to reading this alert and
would like to withdraw your signature, you can legally do so with the
following steps:

1 – Write, type, or print a statement on a piece of paper saying that
you signed the petition for the Government Ethics Reform Initiative
and that you wish to remove your signature from the petition. Include
your name and address.

2 – Take the statement to a Notary Public and sign it in his presence
and have him notarize it.
3 – Deliver the notarized statement to your county clerk’s office.

You should do this as soon as possible, because you can’t get your
signature removed once the petition has been submitted to the
Lieutenant Governor. The petition will be submitted to the Lieutenant
Governor if and when 95,000 signatures get collected. We don’t know
how many signatures have been obtained thus far.

______________________________________________
That concludes GOUtah! Alert #323 – 14 December 2009.

Copyright 2009 by GOUtah!. All rights reserved.





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utbagpiper

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I just got off the phone with Brandon Loomis at the SLTrib. He got a copy of the GOUtah! alert and came looking for some additional information. My thanks to Clark for vectoring him my way.

Brandon said he has spoken to lawyers who were involved with the drafting and they say because the disclosure appears in a section of the initiative dealing with conflicts of public interest, it is not intended to apply to guns.

I responded that I believed that it was nobody’s intent to register guns, and that a judge might actually rule that way. But I could not count on such a ruling and that as I read the black letter of the initiative language, it clearly applied to guns as explained in our alert.

He then suggested the legislature could change some aspects of the law after it was passed by the voters. Again, I conceded this was possible, but I could not count on it happening. I explained that one weakness of an initiative is that it is not subject to the debate and amendments that are normally available to “perfect” (to use parliamentary language) legislation. I said, “I really wish there was nothing in this initiative that would compel me and GOUtah! to come out in opposition to anything with ‘ethics’ in its title. But this provision is a clear threat to RKBA and so we have to oppose it.”

I emphasized we had a three pronged concern with the initiative language relative to RKBA:

1-The disclosure provisions clearly seem to apply to privately owned guns and constitute gun registration and public disclosure of privately owned guns;

2-The felony penalty for every mistake on a disclosure could result in a lifetime ban on RKBA over non-material, unintentional, technical errors. I explained that there are proper methods for penalizing mistakes on disclosures, but to impose the heavy hammer of felony with lifetime loss of RKBA for every mistake, no matter how small or unintentional was going too far and would drive away good men and women from service. This leads to our third concern;

3-The combination of disclosure requirements on personal guns, as well as potential lifetime loss of RKBA for technical, non-material, and unintentional mistakes, errors or omissions on disclosures serves to greatly discourage pro-RKBA members of the community from being willing to serve in the legislature. We are as concerned about this as teachers, cops, ranchers, and others would be if members of their community were heavily discouraged from serving.

I made clear that GOUtah! takes no position on the 99% of the initiative that doesn’t directly affect RKBA. We are single issue and doubtless have members who would support this initiative save for the anti-RKBA portions; we have other members who would oppose aspects of the initiative in addition to the portion dealing with guns.

We’ll see how the write up turns out. Let me know if you see it in the SLTribune in the next few days.

Charles
 

utbagpiper

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Looks like the SLTrib is not very interested in objective, balanced reporting. Their story can be read at <http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_14015350>.

The comments of their readers, almost universally supporting the initiative and attacking guns and gun owners are fairly telling in their own right.

But, GOUtah's position has been given wider exposure and I hope gun owners will carefully consider the ramifications of this initiative before signing it or voting for it.

Charles
 

Kevin Jensen

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utbagpiper wrote:
The comments of their readers, almost universally supporting the initiative and attacking guns and gun owners are fairly telling in their own right.
I hold fast to the belief that the biggest threat to gun ownership are the "anti-gun, gun owners" such as "scoder" below, or perhaps even "thoughtpolice". :p

http://www.tribtowns.com/comments/read_comments.asp?ref=14015350&PageIndex=1

scoder:
12/17/2009 3:22:00 AM
223, the Constitution wasn't written until over a decade after the Minute Men and arguing that todays GUN NUTS are todays Minute Men is assinine. I a gun owner but I strongly support keeping guns out of the hands of idiots and fools. I've been places where it seemed everybody carried a firearm and it was more like Dodge City than Dodge City was. Guns rarely equal security, in fact, they seemed to feed the insecurity the people felt. Following the lead of the NRA why don't we just left folks set up stands on the street and sell AK's like it's done in Bagdad or Mogadisu? Guns do indeed kill people and more times than not the wrong people.
 

utbagpiper

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KSL has now joined in on reporting on this. Like the DesNews, they did not contact GOUtah! directly for comments, but appear to have merely quoted the SLTrib article.

Comments on the KSL site are less hostile than they were on SLTrib, but are not as positive as they often are on gun stories. That may be due to the day of the week.

KSL article can be seen at <http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=9095713>.

Charles
 

utbagpiper

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cheese wrote:
can this be enforced on a select few?
With apologies to Niemoller:

When they came for the full auto machine guns and short barreled shot guns, I was silent. I did not own such things.

When they came for suppressors, I was silent. I did not care about owning silencers.

When they came for saturday night specials I was silent. I had no use for cheap guns.

When they came for the non-violent felons, I was silent. I had always obeyed the laws perfectly.

When they came for mail order sales, out of State sales, and required paperwork to buy new guns, I was silent. I had nothing to hide and no need to buy a gun anywhere but locally.

When they came any who had ever had a mental health issue, or even been convicted of a "domestic violence" misdemeanor, I was silent. I've never had mental health concerns and never had a fight with a lover.

When they came for "assault rifles" I was silent. I had no need for AKs and ARs and Uzis.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.


We can all hang together, or we shall surely all hang separately.

Take your trolling elsewhere, cheese.
 

JoeSparky

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Here are my comments on this...

Ethics Reform WILL create a Firearm registry as written
"Let us just step back just a little bit and think about this for a minute. While the authors of this ethics referendom may not have intended for a gun registry to be created but since firearms ARE regulated by either STATE or FEDERAL Authorities and the proposed reforendum REQUIRES that ALL PROPERTY THAT MAY BE REGULATED be identified to be in compliance with this as it is written... IT DOES CREATE A GUN REGISTRY OF ALL FIREARMS OWNED BY A STATE LEGISLATOR. It doesn't matter that the INTENT of "the ethics initiative is only concerned with a lawmaker's property that may result in a financial conflict of interest". The current wording CAN be read to include firearms.
I have a solution though..... JUST MODIFY TO WORDING TO SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDE FIREARMS OR ANY OTHER PROPERTY THAT WILL NOT RESULT IN THIS POTENTIAL FINANCIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST.
That is of course the REAL intent of the authors WAS TO CREATE A GUN REGISTRY WHILE PRETENDING TO BE ONLY LOOKING AT ETHICS REFORM.
As I see it, right now, the ball is in their court to MODIFY to wording or accept the fact that they were caught in this devious attempt!"


JoeSparky
 

cheese

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cheese

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JoeSparky wrote:
Here are my comments on this...

Ethics Reform WILL create a Firearm registry as written
"Let us just step back just a little bit and think about this for a minute. While the authors of this ethics referendom may not have intended for a gun registry to be created but since firearms ARE regulated by either STATE or FEDERAL Authorities and the proposed reforendum REQUIRES that ALL PROPERTY THAT MAY BE REGULATED be identified to be in compliance with this as it is written... IT DOES CREATE A GUN REGISTRY OF ALL FIREARMS OWNED BY A STATE LEGISLATOR. It doesn't matter that the INTENT of "the ethics initiative is only concerned with a lawmaker's property that may result in a financial conflict of interest". The current wording CAN be read to include firearms.
I have a solution though..... JUST MODIFY TO WORDING TO SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDE FIREARMS OR ANY OTHER PROPERTY THAT WILL NOT RESULT IN THIS POTENTIAL FINANCIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST.
That is of course the REAL intent of the authors WAS TO CREATE A GUN REGISTRY WHILE PRETENDING TO BE ONLY LOOKING AT ETHICS REFORM.
As I see it, right now, the ball is in their court to MODIFY to wording or accept the fact that they were caught in this devious attempt!"


JoeSparky
I do agree that this should not pass as written. It is not constitutional in its current form in my opionion.

This seems that a gun reqistry would be created. I could not support this. Clearly I do not suffer from the AGP disease as seriously as others.
 

cheese

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JoeSparky wrote:
AGP disease?
Come on! You are the great wise one, read the link! It fits so well it will be like your favorite jeans.
 

thx997303

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cheese wrote:
utbagpiper wrote:
SGT Jensen wrote:
If you're not upsetting a few hoplophobes, you're not doing your job. :D


perhaps reading this link:

http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/info_schedule_battle/Anti_Government_Phobia.html

And having a trusted friend or family member take you to the doctor is in order.

Really people lets stick with reality.
^^Accusing SGT Jensen and those who think like him of having Anti Government Phobia.

Clearly I do not suffer from the AGP disease as seriously as others.
^^Presenting yourself as better than those others you insulted.

Come on! You are the great wise one, read the link! It fits so well it will be like your favorite jeans.
^^And here, insinuating that Joe Sparky has AGP.

Any questions?
 
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