GONV | Gun Owners of Nevada

2009 Nevada
Legislative Wrap Up

With your help, Gun Owners Of Nevada (GONV.org) has quickly become a force in Nevada's legislative landscape. We hit the ground running during our initial legislative session and were able to impact some potentially dangerous legislation. There were essentially four firearm/self-defense related bills introduced this session.

The first was a bill that would have codified the Castle Doctrine in Nevada. In the past, Nevada has relied on California precedent when a citizen has had to protect him or herself in their home. This bill would have strengthened the defense of any Nevadan who needed to use force in defense of themselves or their families. The bill was introduced by Harry Mortensen (D-Las Vegas) and that's all there was to it. He put no effort behind it and never seemed to truly understand the importance of the issue. We believe this issue is an important one. And we hope to have it introduced in a future session by someone who values it as much as we do.

The second bill of interest to gun owners was SB 52, the Real ID act. This act would have built a new database of all of your personal data, including (potentially)
firearm ownership, and put this information at the fingertips of every federal, state and local government employee in the country, and incredibly, even foreign governments would have access to this data. And it would have placed this information on a machine readable card that would have become your internal passport. This is a veritable identity theft one-stop-shop. And it's the kind of Orwellian nightmare we in the gun rights community are beginning to see more and more of. GONV had a measurable impact on killing this bill.

AB 433 was the third gun rights related bill. This bill would have made non-use of seat belts a primary offense. Currently, those not wearing seat belts are only issued a citation if they are stopped for some other offense. This was a very emotional issue for people who've lost friends and loved ones in motor vehicle accidents. We certainly understand that. And we obviously recommend that people use their seat belts. But we had become aware that other states with similar statutes were using them as probable cause fishing expeditions. Often, the first question motorists were being asked when stopped for a "seat belt" offense was this: "Do you have any guns in the car?" Clearly, this bill was about something other than seat belt use, and if somebody is doing something illegal, officers are given a wide berth to establish probable cause for the legal search of a vehicle. Fortunately, we (you) were able to help derail this bill with the help of several other organizations.

The fourth gun rights bill was AB 46, also known as the Veterans Disarmament Act. This bill creates a state database of those who are purported to have mental problems and adds this database to the national instant background check database. The problem is that the bill does not discriminate between those who had temporary problems, such as postpartum depression, and those who have serious chronic problems. It will also render returning veterans with post traumatic stress disorder unable to own firearms. As was noted during hearings for the bill, post traumatic stress disorder is often self-limited and short term, and it is one of the most overused and misapplied diagnoses in all of medicine.

Also, AB 46 has no penalty for a government employee incorrectly adding your name to the database. And due process rights for those incorrectly added or no longer ill are not protected, often allowing the government to deny your right to bear arms for years at a time before you can obtain a hearing. We joined with many other groups opposed to this legislation, but were not able to stop it. AB 46 will go into effect soon.

It is important to realize that we have few friends of gun rights in Carson City. There is no hero of gun rights we can count on, and no party that will consistently defend gun rights. Even our friends tend to buckle when faced with the many federal government lobbyists who have been deployed to all fifty state capitols. They bring your federal tax dollars to Carson City expecting to bribe our legislators to do their bidding. That's a great deal of pressure on state legislators and it's an obstacle to what we are attempting to achieve.

The legislator you consider your friend? The one whose kids go to school with your kids? The one who attends your church? The one who has a great barbecue every election season? No matter what he says to you in private, he is very likely doing something very different in Carson City. Why do we say that? Because we've been there and when we're not there, we're watching every hearing, monitoring every vote. What they're doing is not what they're telling you they're doing. And when we lobby them for your gun rights, we hear a lot of excuses. By all means, eat their barbecue. We will be keeping an eye on what they're actually doing in Carson City. And we'll be informing you when pressure is needed to keep them on the right path.

On the whole, we had a successful first legislative session that we are working to build on. We are not going away, even though some legislators certainly wish we would. And it becomes more obvious with each passing day that our efforts must continue. Even now, the Real ID bill we helped kill has been given a new name (Pass ID) and has been reintroduced on the federal level.

With your help and support, we are going to keep fighting for the right of all Nevadans to protect themselves and their families.