The 2021 Arizona Legislative session officially convened on Monday, January 11. By the end of the first week over 500 bills have been filed. The final deadline for filing new bills for the Senate is Monday, February 1. For the House the deadline is Monday, February 8.
AzCDL researches all proposed legislation for language that may impact our right to keep and bear arms. Relevant bills, and their status, will appear on our Bill Tracking page. It’s updated daily during the session. We encourage you to visit the page often. In addition to providing links and basic information on legislation, we add our position along with summaries.
By this time last session, the Democrats had already introduced over a dozen bills to restrict our right to keep and bear arms. By the2020 filing deadline over two dozen anti-rights firearms bills were filed that together fell slightly short of demanding door-to-door firearm confiscations. The good news was that, with your help, all these bills were defeated.
In the first week of the current session, Representative Randall Friese filed a proposed ballot measure, HCR 2012, that would outlaw the private transfer of firearms unless conducted through an FFL with background checks conducted on both the transferor and transferee. Transfer is broadly defined and could include simply handing your firearm to a family member or friend. The penalty for not complying would be a Class 5 felony. We’re expecting many more bills like this to be filed in the coming weeks. With your help, we can once again defeat these attacks on our fundamental rights.
On the plus side, Representative and Majority Whip Leo Biasiucci filed HB 2111 which proposes that any act, law, treaty, rule or regulation of the U.S. Government that violates the Second Amendment would be unenforceable in Arizona.
Following the deadline for filing new legislation, all bills must be heard by committees in their originating chambers (House or Senate) by February 19. As key bills we are monitoring are scheduled for committee hearings, we will call upon you to contact committee members using the Legislature’s Request to Speak (RTS) system. If you have an existing RTS account, please log in to make sure your account is still active. If you are a current AzCDL member and do not have an existing RTS account, please reply to this message with your name and email address and we’ll assist you in setting up an RTS account.
Stay tuned!