Friends and neighbors,
I am sure you have seen the headlines by now, but on May 4, Senate Democrats passed a sweeping and probably unconstitutional gun control bill. As you can probably guess, I voted against it.
Their proposal is guaranteed to end up in court, if it were ever to become law (which, it won’t.) The Attorney General's own fiscal note estimates at least $300,000 in legal costs would be needed to defend it, and potentially much more if the state loses.
The bill is riddled with problems, and you can tell it was put together by people who are not well versed in firearms issues. The assault weapons definition is so broad that it is possible that virtually every pistol in Minnesota could get swept into the "military-style assault weapon" category. When I raised that concern on the floor, Democrats appeared confused and I didn't get a satisfying answer.
The bill has a three-per-year limit for assembling firearms, so I asked whether removing a magazine, racking the slide to check the chamber, and putting it back together counts as "assembling" a firearm. The author admitted the language probably needs work. For a bill with felony penalties attached, that is a major problem.
The bill punishes 2.5 million law-abiding gun owners, makes routine gun ownership more complex and expensive, and in some provisions actually makes schools less safe by creating predictable, publicly known disarmament windows for armed staff. It is a blatant attack on hunting, heritage, and constitutional rights. Minnesotans who are angry about gun violence deserved far better than this messaging exercise.
As I said, this bill is never going to become law. It will never move in the House --- House Republicans and Speaker Demuth have already said this bill is DOA, and every Senate Democrat knew it long before they put it on the calendar for the day. This was purely a political exercise, not a serious attempt at governing or getting things done.
And what should frustrate people most about all this is that we could have made real progress on school safety.
There were some great ideas in the bill, like mental health funding, school safety grants, money for school resource officers, and more. I support those ideas. Republicans even offered an amendment to strip out the controversial gun control provisions and pass a clean, bipartisan school safety bill. Democrats weren’t interested in that.
They chose the partisan version over something that could have actually helped kids, and that's a choice they own.
Sincerely,