The history of civilian disarmament is not a pretty one. In fact, it usually precedes tyranny in the mildest examples, and genocide in the worst. If you are one of the people who might be saying,“Oh my goodness, really?!” let me say this-YES, REALLY.

History is rife with examples of this fact:

• Mid-century-USSR-Stalin-‘nuf said
• 1959-Fidel Castro went back on his promise to establish a Cuban democracy and used a gun registration that a previous Cuban dictator had created as a guide to disarm potential political adversaries.
• 1994-Rwandan government disarmed the population of the country before going on a genocidal rampage and killing 800,000-1 million Tutsi’s despite the presence of the United Nations “Peacekeepers” in the region.

To those who think it cannot happen here-it can. Our founding fathers knew this and that is why they gave us the protection of the first and second amendments. They had suffered under the tyranny of the English monarchy in their homeland and wanted to be sure that the same tyranical forces could not take over in our nation.

Unfortunately, tyranny-like life-finds a way. People forget, grow complacent, and start to think that nothing like what is described above could happen in the U.S. I thought similarly until 2008. This administration has a history of enacting unconstitutional legislation (Obamacare ring any bells?) and when the head of the nation acts this way, those who share his agenda at the state level get motivated. This is the only sense I can make out of Oregon’s HB3200 (link here) . Introduced by usual suspects in this state for gun bans (Ginny Burdick and Laurie Monnes Anderson are involved) this is a frightening concoction that blends the most popular current resolution of banning “high capacity magazines” with the type of police actions that should scare every American-no matter their political affiliation-to death.

(4) The department may conduct inspections of registered owners of assault weapons and large capacity magazines to ensure compliance with the storage requirements of section 4 of this 2013 Act

The above text is directly extracted from the full text of the bill. Do you see anything that mentions warrants being needed to affect this search? Anything about probable cause? NO, this is what makes this bill akin to the Cuban disarmament in 1959 and other frightening precursors to genocides across the world and throughout history.

I cannot encourage Oregon citizens strongly enough to find write, call or find their representative (find them here) and explain to them clearly how frightening this bill is and how much the people of our state object to being treated like criminals by the government that is supposed to work for them.