"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
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].
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.
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.
If you’d like to read arguments both for and against the initiative, here are some useful links. GOUtah! does not endorse or 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 [here].
Argument against the Ethics Reform Initiative [here].
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:
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.
"I wondered how long it would take the gun control propagandists to blame the tragedy that occurred at Fort Hood on the nation's lawful gun owners. I got my answer when I read Pat Bagley's cartoon Nov. 13 that attacked lawful gun owners and the Muslim religion as causes of the tragedy at Fort Hood.
What solutions to the horrific mass murder would Bagley suggest? Does he advocate a total ban on the Muslim religion, or does he take a more moderate stand and simply advocate some sort of registering or licensing scheme? Does he advocate that there is no real protection for the freedom of religion found in the Constitution because the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen a time when there would be Muslims in the United States?
The above statements are ridiculous and offending. To blame lawful ownership of firearms or a long-recognized religion for the actions of a mad man who carried out such a terrible act of violence should not even be dignified by space in your paper. Gun owners and Muslims all deserve an apology."
-- Clayton D. Dumas, in a letter printed in The Salt Lake Tribune, 22 November, 2009.
That concludes the GOUtah! Political and Legislative Alert #323 for 14 December, 2009. We hope this information will be of assistance to you in defending your firearms rights.
Remember that getting this information is meaningless unless You Act On It Today. If you just read it and dump it in the trash, your gun rights, and the gun rights of future generations go in the trash with it. Get involved, get active and get vocal!
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