OREGON MEASURE 114 BACKFIRED; RESIDENTS BOUGHT MORE GUNS
BELLEVUE, WA – Oregon gun prohibitionists just learned a painful lesson with the announcement of a new study which reveals passage of anti-gun Measure 114 led to a stunning increase in gun buying, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms calls it a victory for gun rights and the Second Amendment.
“This was as predictable as winter rain in Portland,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Backers of Measure 114 have been humiliated. Their intention was to make gun ownership so burdensome that the number of firearms in the state would decrease. Instead, Beaver State citizens sent the gun control crowd a message that their narrow win at the polls back in November 2022 has turned into a serious policy and philosophical defeat.”
The study, published in the Journal of Public Economics, reveals that background checks increased by 14 percent in the days leading up to the election, and then skyrocketed a staggering 157 percent after the measure passed by a skin-tight margin of 1.3 percent, amounting to less than 25,000 votes out of more than 1.9 million votes cast. And now, almost four years later, Measure 114 still has not been implemented because it has been tied up in the courts. Oregon voters are still waiting for a ruling on the measure’s constitutionality, and meanwhile, the Legislature has postponed implementation until Jan. 1, 2028, provided it survives the legal challenges.
“Backers of Measure 114 had hoped their permit-to-purchase requirement, which we believe to be wholly unconstitutional under both the state and federal constitutions, would prevent people from buying firearms, and ultimately result in fewer guns in Oregon,” Gottlieb noted. “Their narrow victory awakened Oregonians, who flocked to gun shops and sporting goods stores while literally every major gun rights organization in the country filed federal and state legal challenges, and those battles are still in progress.
“Would-be Utopians in the Willamette Valley who barely passed the measure vastly underestimated the determination of rights-minded citizens from Brookings to Baker City,” he added. “Their nutty dream of a gun-free Oregon has turned into their personal nightmare because now there are more guns in the state, and people realized constitutional rights are not up for grabs, and should not be subject to election outcomes.”
