A civilian-led effort to enact new gun safety rules and ban high-capacity magazines has launched in Oregon after mass shootings last month in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, mobilizing volunteers and voters. .
A group of faith leaders known as the Lift Every Voice Oregon coalition is gathering signatures to try to get a measure, Initiative Petition 17, on the November vote. If approved by voters, it would ban high-capacity magazines of more than 10 rounds and require prospective gun buyers to obtain a license, undergo security training and background checks before purchasing a firearm.
Though the effort is years in the making — faith leaders said they first began considering a voting initiative in 2018 after the Parkland, Florida shootings — the racist shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, which killed 10 people, and the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, boosted their campaign. At the beginning of May, the group had 35,000 signatures.
As of Monday, they have collected 114,000 signatures – 30,000 in the past week alone, according to organizers. That’s more than the minimum of 112,020 registered voter signatures they need to put the proposal on Oregon’s ballot this year, but organizers say they’re working to get more than 140,000 by the end of next week. .
“People are sad and sad — what can we do, what can we do? And they realized that in Oregon we have real legislation that could dictate to the nation what ordinary people can do,” said Rev. WJ Mark Knutson, president of the United Nations. campaign “The energy is off the charts.”
Volunteers have signed up in droves: The coalition now has 1,500 active volunteers, up from 450 before the shooting, ranging in age from a 12-year-old college student to a 94-year-old recent widower. In the basement of Knutson’s church, a few volunteers used to wrap up petitions for volunteers across the state; now, according to organizers, there are more than 20 volunteers a day. Thousands of signatures have come in from people who have downloaded and printed the petition at home and signed it on their own, filling the group’s suddenly too small mailbox every day.
Penny Okamato, a gun control activist long involved with the Lift Every Voice Oregon coalition, said the measure is the “most exciting piece of legislation I’ve ever worked with.”
She said the word “momentum” doesn’t quite cover what’s happening with the petition; she said people are “nausea” with anxiety.
“They know that legislators are going to do nothing because they got away with doing nothing after Sandy Hook,” she said of Congress. “They’re desperate to get something done, and they’re willing to do it themselves.”
To put a question to Oregon voters, citizens must get the voting language approved by the Attorney General — and the state’s Supreme Court if there are issues — and then collect a significant number of signatures in support of it.
“We just saw a complete passivity to gun violence prevention, the kind of thing that would really make a difference,” said Rabbi Michael Cahana, another of the coalition’s leaders. “There was a sense of hopelessness and as faith leaders we believe in hope.”
Lift Every Voice Oregon won approval for the text of the initiative proposal in November; it has until July 8 to collect the required number of signatures.
Oregon is one of 26 states with a vote-initiation process, and Knutson said he believes other states will consider taking action as they must pass safety legislation that lawmakers have refused to implement.
“It’s already been called the ‘Oregon model’ by groups across the country who are thinking along with us,” Knutson said.
Okamato, the executive director of arms safety group Ceasefire Oregon, said Oregon already requires background checks, but arms sales will continue if a background check is not completed after three business days. This is often referred to as the ‘Charleston loophole’, a reference to the 2015 racist murders of nine believers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a young white gunman who obtained a pistol that way.
She said the details of the ballot measure are popular but difficult to implement in Oregon, where Democrats control both houses of the legislature. The governor is also a Democrat.
“We tried to close the loophole in Charleston in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021,” she said, pointing to failed bills in four different sessions and adding that activists had urged the governor to take executive action twice. “I don’t understand myself why legislation makes those polls of such high popularity difficult to get through the Oregon legislature.”
