It's been a month, so now it's time to expand gun "rights" again.
Many Americans imagine the west coast states to be unapologetic dens of liberalism, but the reality is more akin to what you see in most other states, western or not: The cities are indeed hubs of suspiciously-forward thinking, but the vast rural parts of Washington, Oregon, and California are often deeply conservative. They're the sort of places where (this is true) residents fly "Confederate" flags for no clear historical reason or (this is also true) you might find swastikas painted onto a roadside rock or (of course) where residents worry about the gubbermint coming to Jade Helm their guns on any given Tuesday. You know,
that sort of conservative.
The residents of Coos County, Oregon, passed a ballot initiative Tuesday night that requires their sheriff to block the enforcement of state and federal gun laws that he thinks seem unconstitutional.
The 2nd Amendment Preservation Ordinance passed with 61 percent of the vote. The measure directs the sheriff to decide whether certain state and federal gun laws violate the Second Amendment. If he thinks they do, the county is then banned from using any resources to enforce those laws. Any county employee who violates the ordinance will be fined $2,000.
Coos County is a sparsely populated county to the immediate west of Douglas County, recently made famous by the Umpqua Community College mass shooting and for having a County Sheriff who has himself
vowed to the federal gubbermint that he wouldn't be enforcing any federal gun laws he did not personally approve of in his holy capacity as Some Guy. The Douglas County sheriff is also known for
promoting the theory that the Sandy Hook school massacre was itself a "false flag" operation to take citizens' guns away.
In the wake of the Umpqua murders, it seems only natural that Coos County would take a good long look at their neighbor and decide that they needed to get themselves a bit of that.
For the record, county sheriffs are not the final arbiters of which American laws are or are not constitutional. It does not matter how many times Cliven Bundy or other grizzled old morons suppose it: It is not true, it was never true, and it will continue to not be true. And to his credit, the Coos County Sheriff is suspicious of the duties that his county is bound and determined to give him.
Here's what he has to say.
"I'm not sure the courts would agree with that concept," he said. "I would just bet there would be some legal challenges to it."
The net impact of the law is, therefore, symbolic, just another symbolic law to be added to the pile by true American patriots who do not know the first goddamn thing about the founding laws of their nation and who are goddamn proud of not knowing them. It's more specifically part of the hard-right backlash against Oregon's newly expanded background check system, a law aimed at preventing insane lunatics from murdering their fellow citizens but which continues to run afoul of America's many insane lunatics who
very much want to possibly murder their fellow citizens if their fellow citizens someday need murdering. That's the issue here—keeping the loopholes in place to allow certain gun purchases without having to check whether a person is on the Do Not Give A Gun To This Person list. That's what has patriots chafing in their britches.
Everyone can agree that the Sandy Hooks and Umpqua shootings are very sad and tragic, but asking a true American patriot to fill out a wee bit of paperwork when obtaining their very own personal murder weapon—now that's going too far. Being a patriot means not having to fill out that paperwork. Being a patriot means being a little sad about the murders and then stroking your own gun while you mutter about giving folks what's coming to them if they start to question your inherent right to maybe someday do the same thing.