"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…. disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-- Cesare Beccaria, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson
Please plan to attend the local caucus meeting for the political party of your choice on Tuesday, March 23rd at 7:00 pm. Please consider running for the office of state or county delegate, or voting for delegates who support the right to keep and bear arms. Utah’s major newspapers will publish the locations of caucus meetings in their Saturday or Sunday editions.
Thanks to your activism this year, the General Session of the Utah Legislature was, in our opinion, successful from the standpoint of protecting and expanding the right to keep and bear arms. We’re currently going through all the gun related bills to prepare a summary of what passed and what didn’t. We’ve counted several pro-gun-rights bills that passed and haven’t yet found any anti-gun bills that passed. We’ll provide a summary in an upcoming alert.
Please mark 7:00 pm, Tuesday, March 23, 2010 on your calendars. That’s when Utah’s various political parties hold their caucus meetings. If you want to have more political power than most citizens have, you can acquire and exercise such power by attending the local caucus meeting of the party of your choice. These meetings can last anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, with the typical meeting being a bit over one hour.
GOUtah! does not endorse or affiliate with any political party. The basic mechanisms for political activism outlined below apply equally to all political parties in Utah, though each party may have different procedures and rules for its caucuses and conventions.
Those of you who are familiar with the caucus/convention process and are already planning to participate can skip the rest of this article. Those of you who haven’t participated in caucus meetings before might want to keep on reading.
The only way we can prevent additional "gun-control" laws from being passed (and perhaps even eliminate some of the existing "gun-control" laws) is by electing people to the state legislature and to Congress who will work to achieve these goals, or by electing a governor who will veto all "gun-control" bills, or by persuading existing politicians that it’s to their political advantage to protect your Second-Amendment rights.
One way to do this is to make sure that you’re registered to vote, and to make sure that you vote on Election Day for candidates who’ve demonstrated an interest in protecting your rights.
A much more effective way is to get directly involved in the candidate-nominating process. This is the process by which each political party selects its candidates for public office during an election year. Utah is fortunate to be one of the few states that still have an old-fashioned caucus and convention system for selecting candidates. This enables concerned citizens to get directly involved in determining who will be on the ballot in November.
Often, two or more candidates from the same party will file to run for a given office. Thus, each party must select one of those candidates to be placed on the ballot.
Within a given political party in Utah, candidates for local office are chosen at that party’s county convention, as are most candidates for the state legislature.
Candidates for Congress and for statewide office (such as governor, attorney general, etc.), as well as state legislative candidates representing districts that straddle a county line, are chosen at a party’s state convention.
Thus, party conventions in Utah are important, and the people (known as "delegates") who participate and vote in these conventions carry an enormous amount of clout with the politicians. For example, if you live in the district of a state senator who’s leaning the wrong way with regard to a particular gun-related bill during the legislative session, and you write a letter to him explaining that you are a delegate to his party’s county convention and that you want him to protect your gun rights, he’ll probably pay a lot more attention to your letter than he would if your were just an ordinary voter.
So who gets to vote at these conventions? You do, if you manage to become a state or county delegate for your party. You can run for a delegate position by participating in your local caucus meeting on March 23rd. This is actually easier to do than most people realize. If you become a delegate, you’ll have a chance to meet the various candidates from your party. If there’s more than one candidate from your party running for a given office (which is often the case), you’ll get to vote at the convention to select one of those candidates to be on the ballot in November. These conventions take place on a Saturday (usually in late April or early May during an election year), and they typically last a few hours. They’re actually quite fun. Sometimes you even get a free lunch.
Different parties have their own rules as to who may participate in their caucus meetings. Some parties require you to be a registered party member if you wish to vote in the caucus meeting, but they’ll allow you to register on the spot if you’re not already registered. Other parties merely require that you show up at the meeting and be of voting age. Even if you don’t qualify to vote at a caucus meeting, you can still show up and sit in on the meeting and learn how the process works.
Once you’ve decided which party to affiliate with, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to figure out your voting precinct and then find the location of your party’s caucus meeting for that precinct.
You can get your current precinct number from your voter registration card, or from the Lieutenant Governor’s website, or by looking in the government pages of you local phone book and calling your county clerk’s office. Here is the Lieutenant Governor’s website.
Most newspapers will be publishing a list of caucus meeting locations on Saturday March 20th or Sunday March 21st (most likely on Sunday). Another way is to use the Internet. Here are the websites of the Utah political parties, listed in alphabetical order, that are officially recognized by the state and are thus eligible to put candidates on the ballot.
Republican Party*
*Note: The Salt Lake County Republican Party has changed its caucus procedure this year. Instead of meeting in people’s homes in each precinct, each legislative district will meet at a local school or other large building. People will then divide up into separate rooms for their local precinct caucuses.
If you’d like to run for a delegate position at your caucus meeting, it’s a good idea to prepare a little bit. Caucus meetings vary in size, ranging from just a couple of people to 20 or more. You might want to contact your party’s precinct chairman ahead of time and introduce yourself, and mention that you’d like to run for state or county delegate. If the meeting is going to be a large one, it can help to bring a friend or neighbor who lives in the same precinct and who would be willing to nominate you for a delegate position. If there are multiple people seeking the same position, you might wish to have a brief speech prepared. An even better solution is to write up a one-page blurb about your political views and why you think you’d be a good delegate, then put copies of your blurb on the literature table at the caucus meeting or hand them out to the participants.
Quite often, however, these meetings are small and informal and the chairman might simply ask people to raise their hands if they’re interested in a delegate position. This is especially likely to be the case in a mid-term election year such as 2010.
If you attend your local caucus meeting and run for a delegate position, there’s a good chance you’ll be elected as a state or county delegate (or even both), and even if you don’t get elected, you’ll get your feet wet and you’ll feel much more confident about running for a delegate position in 2012.
Note: Actually, it isn’t always true that the final selection of a candidate occurs at the convention. If no single candidate for a given office gets at least 60% of the delegate vote at the convention (which happens occasionally), he and the second-place candidate will face off against each other in a primary election in late June.
We found the following solicitation for quotes from gun dealers from the U.S. Department of Education. The shotguns that the Education Department wants to buy have a barrel length of 14 inches, which makes them short-barreled (or "sawed off") shotguns under federal law. Note that a private citizen wanting to own such a weapon would have to go jump through all sorts of hoops to get permission from the federal government to buy one, since sawed-off shotguns are strictly regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934.
We’re baffled as to why the Education Department would want sawed-off shotguns. One gun-rights activist with whom we’re acquainted speculates that these weapons might be issued to truancy officers.
Read Solicitation Number: EDOOIG-10-000004 here.
The Boston Globe reported in a web article, "Second Amendment does not bar Massachusetts gun laws", on 10 March that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a state law requiring trigger locks on guns kept in people's homes. And, in a companion ruling, it upheld the convictions of a New Bedford man who had argued that the Second Amendment right to bear arms trumped state law making it a crime for an unlicensed person to have a handgun.
But note that earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a gun ownership case in Illinois in which, legal experts say, the court is likely to determine whether the Second Amendment will now be explicitly extended to the states – and state laws and regulations set up to control the use, sale and storage of firearms.
We do hope that the Feds do trump the states on these kinds of laws and restore full Second Amendment rights to all Americans.
"The Utah Legislature is once again in high gear. And, with the likes of SB11 (on letting Utah regulate firearms made and sold in the state), once again I am embarrassed to be a Utahn."
-- Robert Whiting, in a letter printed in thdDeseret News, 4 March 2010.
"How does Senate Bill 11, the Utah-Made Firearms Act, which the governor signed, benefit Utah when felons, drug addicts, gun-traffickers and the mentally deranged can flock to Utah and buy any number of Utah-made guns and avoid the federal background check they know full well they would fail? Laws are meant to improve society, not make it more violent.
Thank heavens for the federal government and the U.S. Constitution, which will hopefully put this parochial madness to rest.
The Legislature, Gov. Gary Herbert and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff are so crazed by states rights and flipping off the federal government that they are willing to gamble on the lives of Utah citizens and the reputation of the state. Who voted for these people? They certainly can't represent the majority of Utah citizens. Our Republican-controlled Legislature has already given Utah the poorest public schools in the nation, hyped getting a concealed weapon permit so that it is quick, easy and cheap for all Americans at Utah taxpayers' expense, and looked the other way as Utah became the major dump site for nuclear waste.
Utah will continue to suffer from this monumental stupidity until the addled GOP political machine is removed from power."
-- Ron Molen, in a letter printed in The Salt Lake Tribune, 9 March 2010.
"The Second Amendment states: 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.' Also embodied in the Constitution is the inherent right of citizens for individual self-determination and personal safety. There are several proposals proceeding through the 2010 Utah Legislature regarding the Second Amendment. Gun control is a contentious issue, but what I don't understand is how the discussion has moved from an individual's right to bear arms to vigilantism and the right of another to impose his or her will on others.
The current version of House Bill 78 provides for individuals' right to defend themselves, but it also allows them to take away my right to decide how I choose to address a situation where my safety may be threatened even though theirs is not: "A person is justified in threatening or using force against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that force or a threat of force is necessary to defend the person or a third person ... ."
This bill effectively allows for the establishment of unregulated vigilantes. Is this really what we want?"
-- Marshal Clark, in a letter printed in The Salt Lake Tribune, 9 March 2010.
"If Don Cannon abhors Christian violence as he claims (Readers' Forum, March 13), then he must read a different Bible and other ancient scripture than I do.
JI don't sanction violence either, but if it came down to it, I would rather be a live, gun-toting Christian than a dead, holier-than-thou pacifist."
-- David E. Jensen, in a letter printed in the Deseret News, 19 March 2010.
That concludes the GOUtah! Political and Legislative Alert #331 for 21 March, 2010. 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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