Senate Committee Guts Major Changes to Oregon Gun Control Law

The permit-to-purchase and magazine ban included in Oregon’s Measure 114 could still take effect if the state Supreme Court rules the gun control measures don’t violate the state’s constitution, but a Senate committee has gutted a bill that would have, among other things, more than doubled the fee for a permit and given county sheriffs up to two months to approve or deny an application. 

House Bill 4145, which advanced out of a House committee only after the bill’s sponsor berated a fellow Democrat who originally voted against it so badly that she switched her vote (and declared he had created a hostile work environment afterward), saw major changes made during its appearance before the Senate Rules committee on Wednesday morning. 

The committee, meeting in a work session, kept the portion of HB 4145 that extends the effective date of Measure 114 to 2028, but scrapped the language increasing the fees and doubling the potential wait time for a permit. That still doesn’t address the underlying problems with Measure 114, but at least the bill won’t make anything worse… so long as the committee’s amended language isn’t further replaced on the Senate floor. 

Assuming the amended version of HB 4145 is adopted by the Senate, the House would need to concur with those changes before the bill could be sent to the governor. If that doesn’t happen, the bill would go to a conference committee where lawmakers would try to find some accord. 

There’s a little sense of urgency to get something done, since Measure 114 is technically slated to take effect later this month. The law, though, is currently on hold thanks to an injunction issued by a Harney County judge in 2023; an injunction that has remained in place as litigation over the constitutionality of Measure 114 has made its way up to the Oregon Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on November 6, 2025. 

There’s a federal lawsuit against Measure 114 as well, including the ban on possessing “large capacity” magazines, but that litigation has been on hold in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals pending the outcome of Duncan v. Bonta at the Supreme Court. Duncan is the challenge to California’s magazine ban, and it, along with several other hardware ban cases, have been discussed in multiple conferences this term without SCOTUS granting or denying cert. 

In fact, it, along with Gator’s Custom Guns v. Washington (another mag ban case), Viramontes v. Cook County, NAGR v. Lamont, and Grant v. Higgins (all cases dealing with bans on so-called assault weapons) have all been re-listed for the Court’s March 6 conference. 

Though today’s development is a positive one, there’s no guarantee that the current language of HB 4145 wont’ change again.. or that the House will accept the major revisions to the legislation. Oregon 2A advocates have done a fantastic job of putting pressure on the Democrat majority, and I think it helps that Measure 114 is nowhere close to being ready for implementation even though the state has had more than three years to try to figure out how to put the permit-to-purchase scheme in place. Hopefully we can keep the measure bottled up until January 1, 2028, and with any luck the Supreme Court will have already struck down similar laws long before Measure 114 can take effect. 

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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