Oregon will have two chances next year to approve new legislation requiring gun owners to safely store their weapons when they aren’t using them. The issue will first go to the Oregon Legislature, but if elected officials once again fail to pass the reforms, the issue will be decided by voters on the 2020 ballot.

The reforms in question date back to 2018, when a group of state gun control advocates attempted to get a measure on that year’s ballot that would require all gun owners to secure their weapon with a trigger lock when not in use, and report lost or stolen weapons within 24 hours. The proposed measure also stipulated that if a gun owner fails to secure their gun and someone steals it, the owner can be held financially liable for any damage caused by their stolen weapon.

That 2018 initiative, Initiative Petition 44 (IP 44), was legally challenged by Second Amendment activists. The Oregon Supreme Court declined to hear the case, giving the team behind IP 44 the go-ahead to get the measure on the ballot. But with just days left to gather enough signatures to get IP 44 onto the ballot, the team decided to wait.

That group of backers went on to form State of Safety Action, the gun-safety nonprofit that just filed IP 40, a new initiative petition that is effectively identical to IP 44. Henry Wessinger, the group’s president, said that while he does expect the proposed measure to also attract legal challenges, this time he isn’t worried about having enough time to collect signatures.

“By the time the Supreme Court refused to accept the challenge to the title [on IP 44], it was only about 10 functional days left to gather the signatures,” Wessinger told the Mercury. “The difference this time is that we have so much time…. I would expect that by the end of 2019, we will have gotten through those challenges and will be in a position where we can start collecting signatures.”

But a ballot measure isn’t the only path to passing statewide gun storage legislation. State of Safety Action is also behind similar legislation introduced to the Oregon Legislature for the recently wrapped-up 2019 session. The main tenants of that legislation landed in Senate Bill 978, a comprehensive gun-control bill that state Democrats thought they had a strong chance of passing—until they were forced to sacrifice it so that state Republicans would come back from one of their two walkouts.

State of Safety Action’s legislation will be reintroduced in the 35-day 2020 session, and Wessinger says he’s received assurance from top Democratic lawmakers that it will pass with bipartisan support this time around. But nothing’s sure in Salem, so State of Safety Action is also pursuing IP 40 as a stopgap to ensure the legislation passes in some form next year.

“The sooner it becomes law,” Wessinger says, “the more lives will be saved.”

While other states have laws governing firearm storage, State of Safety Action believes their legislation would be the first to cover all kinds of guns and apply to all gun owners, whether or not they live with a child. The legislation is also supported by relatives of the victims of a 2012 shooting at the Clackamas Town Center mall, in which the shooter used a gun he had stolen from a friend.

But while IP 40 goes further than current law, Wessinger says it isn’t necessarily a controversial issue—according to a poll conducted by the group last year, 75 percent of Oregon gun owners already follow the storage requirements IP 40 calls for. And the proposed measure imposes fines, rather than criminal punishments, for anyone who fails to follow the rules; Wessinger compared it to the seat belt laws that states passed in the 1980s and 90s, as its goal is to “change behavior” to keep everyone safe.

That argument clearly doesn’t fly with the Oregon Firearms Federation, one of the Second Amendment groups that challenged the 2018's proposed measure.

“We were successful in defeating the worst of the gun legislation in the 2019 session,” reads a statement posted to the group’s website last week, after IP 40 was filed. “But the battle never ends.”

We won’t know until after the conclusion of the 2020 session if State of Safety Action’s proposed measure will be necessary or redundant. But with a reported 65 percent of Oregon's registered voters in favor of gun-storage reform, there’s a good chance Oregonians could approve the regulations that, so far, their state government has failed to put into law.