SB 48 & HB 50 prohibit you from selling your firearms to any distant relatives, friends, neighbors, business associates, or fellow gun club members without government permission. The bills would criminalize nearly all private firearm sales between individuals, regardless of where those transactions take place, and require them to be conducted through a licensed dealer involving extensive federal paperwork, background check and payment of an undetermined fee. Licensed dealers will have to maintain the paperwork recording these transfers for twenty years. Limited exceptions are only made for immediate family members, FFLs and law enforcement agencies, executors or administrators of estates and trusts, or police officers, military personnel, and licensed security guards acting in the course of their official duties.
SB 48 & HB 50 similarly restrict temporary firearm transfers — including gifts, loans, and temporary changes in possession of a firearm, not just gun sales. There are a limited number of exemptions, including transfers necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm, those taking place exclusively at shooting ranges, while hunting or trapping, or during an organized competition or performance, or any time the transferor remains present the entire duration of the transfer. These exemptions are confusing, raise serious questions about the bills’ scope, compliance and enforceability, and highlight the overreach of the measures. Activities that could be criminalized under the bills without going through an FFL and obtaining government permission:
- A man loaning his girlfriend or fiancée his handgun for self-protection when homes or apartments in her neighborhood have been burglarized;
- A member of the military who is deployed overseas and wants to store his or her personal firearms with a trusted friend;
- Someone borrowing their co-worker’s gun to take on a hunting trip, to the local range or to shoot on BLM land when the colleague cannot accompany him or her on the excursion.
- Working ranch employees possessing and transporting ranch-owned rifles in vehicles or on their person.
- Volunteers staging auction or raffle items for a non-profit, charitable fundraising event where a firearm is displayed.
SB 48 & 50 also require the return of loaned firearms to original owners be conducted through a licensed dealer, with completion of federal paperwork and payment of an undetermined fee. The bill exempts “temporary” exchanges and only then if the transfer and the transferee’s possession take place exclusively at one of the locations or during one of the activities listed in the paragraph above. How are the original owners of firearms supposed to take back permanent possession of
STATE CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISION – Article II, Section 6.
“No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms.”
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