Our Rhode Island government is very antagonistic towards our gun rights. Many of us have known this for a long time, some of us are just learning how bad it is over the last year, and some people still don’t know how bad it is. How many people don’t know that they are committing a felony just for having something in their safe, securely locked up, that they bought perfectly legally five, ten, or even twenty years ago? There is a case currently in the RI court system where a woman was arrested for LEGALLY defending herself from a home invader, because her legally purchased Glock 17 still had the factory 17-round magazine. That’s right; she was arrested and charged with a felony, which can receive a maximum punishment of five years behind bars and $5000 fine – per standard factory magazine.
When I went to look up the law to share the text with you I noticed something else. It’s hidden. That’s right, our RILegislature.gov website that hosts the laws of our state does not list it with every other gun law on the books. All of our gun laws are in section 11-47 of the RI General Laws, but there is no mention anywhere on that page about “large capacity feeding devices”. That’s because this text is the ONLY statute listed under section 11-47.1. It’s almost like they don’t want you to know that they made you a criminal behind your back.
Do you know what they are trying to pass this year? The main bill they are trying to force through is an “Assault Weapon” ban, or AWB. As Dan and Roy have noted in previous articles on this site, the firearms they are trying to ban are not classified as Assault Weapons from a technical description, and only qualify from a legal description because our lawmakers made up the term and the definitions they wish to apply to the term. This year’s assault on our rights started on Tuesday, January 14th when Governor McKee announced at the very end of this State of the State address that he was submitting this ban language inside of the fiscal year 2025 budget bill, to bypass the proper legislative process of going through the Judicial committees of the House and Senate chambers.
At the time of this writing, we are uncertain if this is going to work, as there is still time for the lawmakers to remove it from the budget and introduce it as a standalone bill, as they have done for the past few years. If this happens, the wording of the bill can change slightly, or be entirely re-written, so we don’t even know how bad it could become.
Now that I hope I have sufficiently scared you, I am going to ask you to help out. If you own any guns, know a friend or family member in the state who does, or are considering buying a gun, we need you to help us. There are several ways to do this, as I will outline here.
Contact your representatives
Every resident has a Representative and a Senator that was elected to represent you in Providence. Do you know who yours are, and how to contact them? The RI Secretary of State website has a Voter Information Center page with some tools that you should be familiar with. The first is the Find Your Elected Officials page. If you enter your 5-digit zip code, then select your town, enter your street number and name, this will show you who your officials are. By clicking on their name, you can get more details including contact information. I have noticed that not all contacts are listed for all people, so if yours isn’t listed, you can use the RI Legislature website to find your Representative and Senator with their contact information.
Now that you have their contact information, use it. Call them and politely let them know how you feel about the anti-gun bills they will be hearing this year. Also, let them know about any pro-gun bills that are coming up. If you don’t want to call, then write them an email. List the bills by number – we will publish the list when they are all introduced – and let them know if you support or reject each bill. It looks better if you can send one email per bill, as they have to report the number of emails they receive, and on which side of the vote they stand for. If you send twenty emails for 20 bills instead of one email, those numbers look better.
Remember to be polite, not threatening, and do not use vulgar language. They will use this against us. One representative in 2024 actually stated that she had received several threatening phone calls over a bill she introduced, that this made her afraid for her safety, and gave her more of a reason to take our guns away – for her “safety”. So let’s not give them any more ammunition than they already have.
Disaffiliate from the Republican Party
Politicians love power. They run for office because it gives them power, and they write and pass laws to increase their name visibility, allowing them to run for higher offices, giving them even more power. One way to get them to pause is to threaten their power. Governor McKee won his primary election by 3,357 votes. Many state level primaries were determined by several hundred votes. These are very small numbers, and they can be overcome.
In Rhode Island, you must be registered to vote and affiliated with a party to vote in that party’s primary elections. But, if you are unaffiliated, you can register for a party when you go to vote, right at your polling location. This means that if you disaffiliate now, you will be able to vote in the Democrat primary elections. By voting against the incumbent, we can have them removed from office by default, as they won’t even make it to the general election ballot. Even if we can’t get a Republican into office in the general, the person who voted against your right will have lost their power.
How do you disaffiliate? This brings us back to the Secretary of State Voter Information Center website’s Update Voter Record page. Enter your current information, click “/edit my voter record”, provide your DMV issued ID number (driver’s license number or state-issued ID number) and click next, confirm your eligibility by reading and agreeing to the four requirements by checking the boxes, click next again, then hit Edit under Affiliation. Choose Unaffiliated. Answer the final questions and confirmations, and finally choose Next to finish the process.
Get involved
There are several state-wide organizations that are looking for people that can help them. If you have any special skills or knowledge that you feel would help, that is great. Some specialties that can definitely be used are lawyers, web designers/coders, people with access to print shops, marketing channels, fundraising skills, and more. If you don’t think you can do anything special, you are wrong. Even if you haven’t done anything like this, there is always something you can help with. A lot of the work we need is pretty easy, but is time consuming. You can be shown how to do something, and just work through one task after another.
There are several organizations that specialize in the Second Amendment community and maintaining our rights. Here are a few of them that are looking for some help.
- The Rhode Island 2nd Amendment PAC is looking for a dozen people who want to help, and they can show you what they need done and how to do it. Contact Glenn via email to see how you can volunteer.
- The Rhode Island 2nd Amendment Coalition is another organization, not related to the PAC, that brings people together and helps with legal battles. They are looking for a few people to volunteer their time as well. You can contact them via email.
- The Federated RI Sportsmans Club is an organization that brings all the gun clubs, stores, and gun owners together to provide information on what’s going on to everybody. They are looking for people to help volunteer their time for helping coordinate between clubs, reviewing or organizing data, and a bunch of other work. They are also reachable via email.
- Para Bellum Provisions does a lot of research on the bills, on the Attorney General’s crime reports, and other statistical information. The AG Crime Bill report takes hundreds of hours alone just to filter through the BS and get to the real data. We also provide free or reduced price gun safety trainings for the purposes of reducing accidental or negligent firearms incidents and to introduce more people to guns, bringing them into our community hopefully voting with us. We can be reached via email or by the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page.
If you don’t want to get involved with a larger organization, you can start your own. Get a group of like-minded friends in your area together and ask yourselves how you can help. Can you do a fundraiser to support legal challenges, or to buy ad spots on TV and radio that can be donated to a group? Be creative, you may think of something nobody else has. And if we can say that we have 20 separate groups that are doing their own thing, but also working with each other, it makes us look bigger than we are, and that can scare the anti-gun politicians against voting our rights away.
Bring more people to our side
One thing we tend to avoid is talking publicly about guns; owning guns, shooting guns at the range, or carrying guns concealed with the proper license. This means that we could be standing right next to somebody with the same beliefs, and we will never even know it. Or you could be next to somebody who just has been thinking about getting a gun for protection at home, but don’t know where to start. This is a stigma that almost every gun owner in this state has, and I completely understand the reasons. We don’t want to be looked at as “evil” by the leftists, or have somebody call the police thinking you are threatening them because they feel “uncomfortable” just hearing the word gun.
But guns are a lot more mainstream now than they were a decade ago. People are pissed about a lot of stuff going on in this state, are upset at our politicians over the collapsing bridge, or the security breach of almost half the people in the state, or whatever else we have going on. Talk more openly. See where people stand. If they are also a gun person, you might have just made a new friend and range buddy. If they aren’t, but are considering, try taking them to the range and trying it out. We recommend shooting .22LR guns for a first time shooter, then working up from there.
If you aren’t comfortable with that, Para Bellum Provisions runs free safety classes almost every month. Send them to us and we’ll cover the safety part and help them fire their first shots with certified instructors in a safe environment. Feel free to come with them and get a refresher for yourself while keeping them company and comfortable that they know somebody there.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of ways you can get involved and help us save our rights. You are the only person who knows the best way for you to get involved, but what I can tell you is that if we don’t get more people involved, and fast, we won’t have any rights left to fight for. So let’s step up, get active, and save our state!