FILE - Oregonians have increasingly bought firearms as Measure 114 is held up in legal limbo, according to a new study from Oregon State.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
As Oregon’s ambitious gun restrictions were stuck in legal limbo, gun sales surged across the state, according to new research published this week.
Measure 114 would ban high-capacity gun magazines and require more training and backgrounding of prospective gun owners, but it has been held up in the court system since its passage in November 2022. It was slated to go into effect 30 days later.
It currently awaits a decision by the Oregon Supreme Court and the soonest it could go into effect would be Jan. 1, 2028.
In the meantime, gun stores and customers have availed themselves to the status quo. Researchers said background checks soared along with sales.
“Folks immediately went out and began buying a lot more firearms,” Katie Bollman, a researcher at Oregon State University, told OPB. “We saw this big increase in firearm demand.”
Bollman and three other researchers estimate there was a 157% surge in background checks in the month after the 2022 election. For the year-and-a-half that followed, Oregonians clocked 63,000 additional background checks than normally seen, the researchers said.
“It does highlight that people are very responsive to the possibility that they can’t buy a firearm in the future, or that it’ll be harder for them to buy a firearm in the future,” Bollman said.
The phenomenon isn’t new to gun owners in the Pacific Northwest, where lawmakers have lately pushed for restrictions. Gator’s Custom Guns in Kelso, Wash., reported a Black Friday-like rush to buy high-capacity magazines in the face of a statewide ban.
But sales data are hard to come by in Oregon and the data come with some caveats.
The state does not track firearm transactions like some others, hence why researchers — who come from OSU, the University of Oregon and Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research — used background checks as a proxy. They used complex statistical methods to combine that data with other states’ to map the trend.
One background check doesn’t equate to one person necessarily, Bollman said, nor does it equate to one gun purchased. The team estimated there were 1.05 guns purchased per background check — 66,000 guns.
Amie Wexler, executive director for the gun safety organization Alliance for a Safe Oregon, said it’s understood how new restrictions can drive firearm sales. She lamented that the Oregon law hasn’t gone into effect yet, but said its impact on gun safety would outweigh the recent surge in sales.
“We are looking at a long horizon here of keeping Oregonians safe,” Wexler said. “There may be more guns in homes right now, but we know Measure 114 will save lives when it’s implemented.”
Measure 114 was not overwhelmingly popular. Voters narrowly passed the bill at the ballot box with the package garnering 50.7% of the vote.
