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A "Rebuttal" From Senator Prozanski |
As
you know from pervious alerts, Senator Floyd Prozanski has introduced
a bill to reverse the gains we made in SB 603 in 2009.
Because you contacted the Senator and urged him to reconsider,
he sent many of you an e-mail with the following message:
Thanks for your e-mail. It appears
that OFF has failed to fully explain the proposed change for
SB 603.
When we passed SB 603, it was my intent to ensure a person who
had one felony conviction to be able to petition a court to
be able to "possess" a firearm after 15 years had
passed. (Under the old law, the felon would automatically have
their right to "purchase" a firearm after 15 yrs,
but would still be in violation of the misdemeanor, "Unlawful
Possession of a Firearm" as a felon. That did not seem
fair to me and I agreed w/ Kevin from OFF that we should fix
this problem.) Unfortunately, after the bill (SB 603) passed
the legislature we learned that a drafting error in the bill
would allow multiple convicted felons (excluding murders and
firearm offenses) to immediately be eligible to petition a court
to restore their guns rights as soon as they are released from
prison!
As a gun owner for 40 years and as a prosecutor for the last
23 years, I do not believe felons, let alone multiple convicted
felon should be eligible to petition the court upon release
from prison for their gun rights. Do you?
I've told Kevin and Rod Harder of NRA that I'm willing to establishing
a procedure to allow some felons to be eligible to petition
the court earlier than 15 years, but we can not complete that
work during the 28 day mini-session in February. We can work
on it during the remainder of this interim and consider changes
in the 2011 Regular Session.
FYI: Every other gun owner that I talked about the error in
SB 603 said they agreed that felons should not be able to immediately
petition the court for their guns rights. (Remember - Most of
these felons would still be on post-prison supervision/parole!)
Hope this gives you a better understanding. I would be interested
in your position on multiple convicted felons being allowed
the get their gun rights back immediately upon leaving prison.
Floyd
We disagree that we failed to
fully explain the proposed changes, in fact we explained them
in detail and that's why so many of you took action and the
bill passed with no opposition in both houses.
On February 26th, we received an e-mail from a staff member
of the Senator's asking if we would print his response to our
alerts, which he had edited and updated for our "use."
The text of that e-mail follows:
Thanks for your e-mail. It appears
that OFF has failed to fully explain the proposed change for
SB 603.
When we passed SB 603, it was my intent to ensure a person who
had one felony conviction to be able to petition a court to
be able to "possess" a firearm after 15 years had
passed. (Under the old law, the felon would automatically have
their right to "purchase" a firearm after 15 yrs,
but would still be in violation of the misdemeanor, "Unlawful
Possession of a Firearm" as a felon. That did not seem
fair to me and I agreed w/ Kevin from OFF that we should fix
this problem.) Unfortunately, after the bill (SB 603) passed
the legislature we learned that a drafting error in the bill
would allow multiple convicted felons (excluding murders and
firearm offenses) to immediately be eligible to petition a court
to restore their guns rights as soon as they are released from
prison!
As a gun owner for 40 years and as a prosecutor for the last
23 years, I do not believe felons, let alone multiple convicted
felon should be eligible to petition the court upon release
from prison for their gun rights. (Remember - Most of these
felons would still be on post-prison supervision/parole!)
I've told Kevin and Rod Harder of NRA that I'm willing to establishing
a procedure to allow some felons to be eligible to petition
the court earlier than 15 years, but we can not complete that
work during the 28 day mini-session in February. We can work
on it during the remainder of this interim and consider changes
in the 2011 Regular Session. Both agreed to this approach, but
apparently, Kevin decided to distribute inaccurate information.
FYI: Every other gun owner that I talked about the error in
SB 603 said they agreed that felons should not be able to immediately
petition the court for their guns rights.
Hope this gives you a better understanding. I would be interested
in your position on multiple convicted felons being allowed
the get their gun rights back immediately upon leaving prison...
pls respond.
Floyd
It's
an odd request that we print a rebuttal that asserts
that we are liars, but we responded and said we would post this,
but we would, of course, be forced to point out the errors in
his note, of which there were several. Prozanski again misread
the language of his own corrections, but what was most troubling
was his assertions that we had "failed to fully explain
the proposed changes" (after all we posted links to the
actual bill) and his assertion that both we, and the NRA's rep
Rod Harder, agreed to allow this bill to move forward and then
consider changes in 2011. This is patently false. Both
Kevin Starrett of OFF and Rod Harder of the NRA attended a meeting
with Senator Prozanski and the Department of Justice in January.
At the time we both said in no uncertain terms that the
special session was NOT the time to make this major
reversal. How Senator Prozanski could have come to any other
conclusion is a mystery. OFF members worked very hard
to pass this commonsense bill and we certainly were not about
to throw it out the window. We made that clear to Senator
Prozanski in an e-mail we sent him following his request that
we print his "rebuttal."
Today we received a "corrected"version
of his rebuttal with another request that we print it. That
one follows:
SB 603 - Response to OFF e-mailThanks for your e-mail. It
appears that OFF has failed to fully explain the proposed change
for SB 603.
When we passed SB 603, it was my intent to ensure a person who
had one felony conviction to be able to petition a court
to be able to "possess" a firearm after 15 years had
passed.
Under the old law while there was no restrictions on who could
petition to purchase a firearm, felons could never petition
to possess a firearm. While felons were automatically excluded
from the felon in possession offense after 15 years if they
only had one offense that was not criminal homicide and did
not involve a gun, a felon could never petition a court to remove
the misdemeanor in possession violation.
That did not seem fair to me and I agreed w/ Kevin from OFF
that we should fix this problem.
Unfortunately, after the bill (SB 603) passed the legislature
we learned that we allowed all felons to immediately be eligible
to petition a court to restore their guns rights as soon as
they are released from prison!
As a gun owner for 40 years and as a prosecutor for the
last 23 years, I do not believe felons, let alone multiple
convicted felon should be eligible to petition the court upon
release from prison for their gun rights. (Remember - Most of
these felons would still be on post-prison supervision/parole!)
I've told Kevin and Rod Harder of NRA that I'm willing to establishing
a procedure to allow some felons to be eligible to petition
the court earlier than 15 years, but we can not complete that
work during the 28 day mini-session in February. We can work
on it during the remainder of this interim and consider changes
in the 2011 Regular Session. Both agreed to this approach, but
apparently, Kevin decided to distribute inaccurate information.
FYI: Every other gun owner that I talked to about the error
in SB 603 said they agreed that felons should not be able to
immediately petition the court for their guns rights.
Hope this gives you a better understanding. I would be interested
in your position on multiple convicted felons being allowed
the get their gun rights back immediately upon leaving prison...
pls respond.
Floyd
Once again,
Prozanski states that NRA and OFF agreed to something we adamantly
opposed. This assertion is false pure and simple, and the Senators
repeated assertions don't change that fact. Furthermore, although
the Senator told us that "every OFF member he spoke to"
agreed that felons should not able to be able to immediately
petition to have their rights restored, we have not heard from
a single one. We are confident that OFF members know that too
many people in this country are "felons" for the flimsiest
of reasons and that everyone deserves to be able to at least
make a case for rights restoration.
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