PA Bill Number: HB2235
Title: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ...
Description: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ... ...
Last Action: Referred to LABOR AND INDUSTRY
Last Action Date: Apr 25, 2024
Antis crow over Oregon win, reveal next smoke and mirrors Washington push :: 05/05/2015
Gun prohibition lobbyists are crowing over their victory in Oregon yesterday – a win based largely on delusion, critics suggest – and they are already revealing their next target in neighboring Washington, and the entire country should be watching because if they can win in the Northwest, this effort will spread to other regions soon.
Senate Bill 941, the so-called “universal background check” measure that Gov. Kate Brown indicated she will sign, passed on a 32-28 vote. But critics of the legislation are quoted by the Portland Oregonian, explaining that yesterday’s passage provides only the illusion of accomplishment.
“This is going to have zero impact on the bad people,” Forest Grove physician and gun collector James Caro told a reporter, “but it's going to create a lot of hassle, particularly for people in rural Oregon.”
“The tragedies at Sandy Hook, at Clackamas Town Center would not have been stopped by this bill,” added House Minority Leader Mike McLane (R-Powell Butte).
It seems like “déjà vu all over again” after what happened last year in Washington. Voters passed Initiative 594, which is currently being challenged in federal district court, after a $10 million-plus advertising campaign backed by wealthy Seattle-area elitists and by billionaire anti-gunner Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety.”
Yesterday, Everytown sent an e-mail blast declaring, “This is an incredible victory for Oregon -- but also for gun sense across the country -- because it shows what happens when we come together to stand up to the gun lobby. Not only do we win, we win BIG.”
They also don’t fold up their tent and go home. Almost simultaneously with the Everytown release, the anti-gun Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility (WAGR) essentially revealed its next target, a safe storage law. And to do it, they’re exploiting last week’s non-injury shooting at North Thurston High School. The teen responsible fired two rounds from a .357 Magnum taken from home without permission. He was tackled by a teacher, and subsequently jailed.
This was an intentional misuse of a firearm, same as last October’s shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, but is WAGR playing smoke and mirrors with its new effort? It cites a study of a safe storage law in Florida that “showed their rate of unintentional child firearm deaths dropped 51% compared to states with weaker laws. Overall, states with CAP laws in place for at least one year saw a 23% drop in unintentional firearm deaths among children younger than 15.”
Coincidentally, yesterday the National Shooting Sports Foundation, in its weekly “Bullet Points” bulletin, noted the following: “Anti-gun groups are attempting to bolster their latest push to demonize firearms by trying to equate unintentional (accidental) motor vehicle deaths with firearm-related deaths.
“This apples-to-oranges comparison is absurd,” NSSF asserts, “and as the latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and National Safety Council show, because it requires that the intentional misuse of firearms for homicide and suicide be included. As CDC and NSC report, there were more than 35,000 deaths by unintentional injury in 2013 involving motor vehicles compared to a total of 505 (CDC’s number) among all age groups involving firearms.
“In NSC’s Injury Facts 2015 report, firearms are no longer even listed among the top causes of unintentional deaths,” the report adds, “which are led by poisoning (more than 38,000 in 2013), motor vehicles, falls, choking, drowning, fire and suffocation. For children under 14, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of fatality, with more than 1,401 children dying by this cause in 2011. According to NSC, accidental firearm fatalities declined by 18 percent from 2004 to 2013. Among all these statistics, here is one to keep handy: Firearms are involved in only 0.4 percent of all unintentional fatalities.”
While gun prohibitionists are busy trying to manage people, look what gun ownership has done in the past year for wildlife management. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced last week that it will distribute $1.1 billion in revenues generated by the special federal excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment. This money goes to fish and wildlife restoration programs supported by outdoorsmen and women.
Of that total, $808,492,189 comes from the federal Pittman-Robertson fund, established in the 1930s, that collects an excise tax on firearms and ammunition, and archery equipment. That money is apportioned to the states for wildlife conservation and management programs. According to this year’s breakdown, Idaho receives $15,584,921, while Washington gets $15,239,993 and Oregon surpasses them with $18,283,088.
Over the years, according to USFWS data, hunters and shooters have contributed more than $8.4 billion to wildlife restoration and hunter education programs operated by state natural resource agencies.
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