“This bill would clearly put restrictions on who could gather in a group and for what reasons they chose to,” wrote Matthew Holman, a resident of Coos Bay, a town on Oregon's southwest coast. Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from suburban Portland, said the proposed reforms “would make it harder for private paramilitaries to operate with impunity throughout Oregon, regardless of their ideology.”īut dozens of conservative Oregonians, in written testimony, have expressed suspicion that the Democrat-controlled Legislature aims to pass a bill restricting the right to assemble and that the legislation would target right-wing armed groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, but not black-clad anarchists who have vandalized downtown Portland and battled police. Opponents say the law would infringe on rights to freely associate and to bear arms. The Oregon bill is also unique because it would allow people injured by private, unauthorized paramilitary activity to sue, she said. A court could block paramilitary members from pursuing an activity if the state attorney general believed it would be illegal conduct.Īll 50 states prohibit private paramilitary organizations and/or paramilitary activity, but no other law creates civil remedies, said Mary McCord, an expert on terrorism and domestic extremism who helped craft the bill. It would provide citizens and the state attorney general with civil remedies in court if armed members of a private paramilitary group interfere with, or intimidate, another person who is engaging in an activity they have a legal right to do, such as voting. Now, the state Legislature is considering a bill that, experts say, would create the nation’s most comprehensive law against paramilitary activity. ![]() Over the past decade, Oregon experienced the sixth-highest number of extremist incidents in the nation, despite being 27th in population, according to an Oregon Secretary of State report. Clashes between gun-toting right-wingers and leftist militants. Over 100 straight days of racial justice protests that turned downtown Portland into a battleground. An armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge.
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