(or any other interested parties)
New Arizona Laws
The 2017 legislative session ended on May 10. Laws passed during a session are generally effective 90 days after adjournment. The following pro-rights bills will become law on August 9. You can view the status of all the bills AzCDL monitored during the session at our website’s Bill Tracking page.
Pro-rights Legislation
HB 2216 (Rep. Paul Boyer, R-LD20) makes it unlawful to require a person to use or subject themselves to electronic firearm tracking technology, a component of “smart gun” technology that limits the operation of a firearm as well as tracking its location and logging its use.
SB 1122 (Sen. Gail Griffin, R-LD14) prohibits a city, town, county, or the state from requiring the search of any federal or state database as a requirement for transferring personal property, such as your firearm. Passage of this law should help complicate efforts we expect to see requiring “universal background checks” on private firearm transfers in Arizona.
SB 1344 (Sen. John Kavanagh, R-LD23) is the AzCDL-requested bill that clarifies that state and local governments cannot regulate the possession of weapons by employees or contractors in or on their privately owned property or vehicles. This bill grew out of over-zealous local governments believing they can control all aspects of an employee’s or independent contractor’s private life.
Ballot Measure Reforms
The Constitution of Arizona, along with several other states, contains a provision influenced by the “Progressive” (i.e., Socialist) movement of the early 20th Century. This provision allows for changes in state law, or even the Constitution itself, via a “citizen initiative” ballot measure bypassing the legislative process. All that’s required to put an issue on the ballot are petition signatures from a small percentage of registered voters. Unlike other states, once a citizen initiative ballot measure is passed in Arizona it can never be overturned by the Legislature.
Billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been exploiting this weakness in state constitutions to further his drive to disarm law abiding Americans. In 2014 he successfully used the ballot measure process to achieve gun owner registration via “universal background checks” in the state of Washington. In 2015, the Oregon legislature accommodated Bloomberg by passing similar laws. In 2016, a Bloomberg backed ballot measure passed in Nevada. We expect to see a Bloomberg backed ballot measure calling for “universal background checks” in Arizona, possibly in 2018.
This year the Legislature passed, and the Governor signed, two laws that restore integrity to Arizona’s petition gathering process for ballot measures.
HB 2244 requires strict compliance to the ballot referendum constitutional and statutory requirements.
HB 2404 prohibits payment to petition “circulators” based on the number of signatures collected. It also invalidates signatures collected by a paid circulator who fails to register with the Secretary of State. New provisions have been added for challenging a ballot measure. Apparently this new law is so threatening to those who want to take your rights away that a ballot petition has already been filed to overturn the provisions of HB 2404 in 2018.
We expect bigger challenges next year. Those who want to disarm you, realizing that there is little chance of restricting your rights at the national level, are redoubling their efforts at the state level where they have the greatest chances to succeed. Arizona is their number one target. Stay alert. Don’t succumb to “Trump Sleep.”

These alerts are a project of the Arizona Citizens Defense League (AzCDL), an all-volunteer, non-profit, non-partisan grassroots organization.
AzCDL – Protecting Your Freedom