Portland Tribune:
A handful of Oregon Episcopal School 12th grade students will ask Portland’s City Council on Wednesday to adopt a strict gun control measure.
It’s part of a semester-long class research project on engaged citizenship, says Mike Gwaltney, chairman of the OES History Department and a teacher at the Raleigh Hills school on Southwest Nicol Road.
During the council’s Wednesday morning meeting, OES students Maddie Mosscrop, Elizabeth Keeney, Zach Solomon, Rowan Berridge, Nut Cheepsongsuk, Meredith Loy, Teddy Morrissette, Jackson Thomas, Peter Graham and Chelsea Choi, will propose that the city adopt an ordinance banning the manufacture or sale of “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons …
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales, who has advocated for stricter gun safety laws, in January 2013 signed on to a statement of principles endorsed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national group formed in the wake of the December 2012 shootings at Clackamas Town Center and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Hales proposed requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, banning “military-style” assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines and making gun trafficking a federal crime.
The OES students’ measure is modeled on similar ordinances adopted by Sunnyvale, Calif., Highland Park, Ill., and Washington, D.C. It’s also an extension of ordinances adopted by Portland’s city commissioners in December 2010.
[ … ]
The students’ proposal comes on the heels of a plan by U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer announced Monday to treat gun safety like automobiles and tobacco use.
Blumenauer, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District, outlined his proposal during a Feb. 9 press conference with the introduction of a new report, ‘Enough Is Enough.’
Blumenauer plans to turn the report’s nine proposals into federal legislation later this year. The proposals are based on the federal government’s response to automobile safety and reduction of tobacco use “two significant public safety challenges where the government responded in ways that dramatically reduced injury and death, success came from defining the problem, identifying risk factors, testing prevention strategies, and ensuring widespread adoption of effective solutions,” Blumenauer said Monday in Portland …
Among Blumenauer’s proposals:
• Closing the private sale loophole so no guns could not be sold without a background check.
• Improve the mental health system so some people with mental illnesses cannot get guns.
• Authorize and increase research on ways to prevent gun violence.
• Limit access to “the most dangerous weapons.”
• Include firearms in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Act.
If you read Blumenauer’s report – and I have – you will find a veritable orgy of government control over every aspect of your rights, from giving the government bureaucrats control over the design, testing, sale and manufacture of guns, to involvement of the CDC and other health professionals in whether any one individual or class of individuals should be allowed to have weapons, to prohibition of certain types of weapons and magazines, to ending what they call the “private sale loophole” (see page 11). It’s a collectivist’s wet dream of government regulation and control.
Now, this won’t get passed in either the House or Senate. I have come to believe that this isn’t the point of the report. This “protest” by the school children (probably all orchestrated by their collectivist teachers) was timed to begin with the push for federal legislation, which won’t pass but that fact will be used to pressure local officials because “we can do something even Congress can’t.”
Money will eventually flow into Oregon from Bloomberg and Gates if it hasn’t already started. The new paradigm for gun control efforts is the state level, not the federal level (where they will lose) or the local level (where preemption laws turn their efforts to waste).
This serves as a warning to all readers in Oregon. Saddle up your horses now. Get you bedroll ready, strap it on to the saddle, get some oats, salted pork, and horse feed. Grab your oilskin coat. Get your carbine and pistols ready, clean them, and get your ammunition. Hit the trail now, your posse is needed. It will be a long time before you sleep.
Get busy immediately or you will be the next in line after Washington’s I-594. The evil one has designs on your soul. You’re in the fight of your life. It has already begun while you were sleeping.
