Nevada Legislature: Gun rights measures die during Friday’s deadline

A total of 39 bills died Friday at midnight because they couldn’t get out of committee in the 2015 Legislature — including a number of gun-rights measures proposed by members of the Assembly.

Friday was the deadline for all legislation to clear committee and move to the floor in the second house.

The vast majority of the 10 Senate and 29 Assembly bills on the list died in the judiciary committees, which isn’t unusual because of the volume of measures referred there.

Friday’s deadline was the prelude to the next deadline — final passage of non-exempt measures from the second house — which hits May 22.

Among Friday’s dead is the controversial “campus carry” legislation. AB148 would have allowed individuals with concealed weapons permits to carry their gun to university or community college classes. That measure along with AB352 expanding the right to carry weapons in public buildings, AB357 providing a more automatic path to restoration of 2nd Amendment rights and AB404 expanding recognition of out of state CCW permits and changing rules for gun dealers all died in the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as AB100, requiring the Attorney General to challenge any presidential executive order that appears to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of Nevadans.

Also dead in that committee is AB283 — the bill declaring local law enforcement has control over federal law enforcement agents and decides whether to authorize them to operate even on federal land in the state.

Senate bills that died Friday night include SB164, which would have added gender identity and sexual orientation to the laws that prohibit discrimination in Nevada. The bill also would have included those as aggravators for imposing the death penalty in murder cases.

SB339 allowing campuses in the university system to impose more restrictions on the sale and use of tobacco died as did SB167 prohibiting employment discrimination against a worker for asking about pay equity. That issue was raised because of situations in which women are paid less than men for the same work but claim they were discriminated against when they questioned the difference.

In order to survive Friday’s deadline, bills that didn’t make it out of committee had to have an exemption — most commonly because they were determined to have a fiscal impact on the state budget. A review of the legislative website Sunday morning revealed no shortage of exempt bills.

There were 89 in Senate Finance including 24 Assembly measures. There were another 94 measures in Assembly Ways and Means including eight Senate bills.

There were 10 measures in the Senate Revenue and Economic Development Committee, two of them from the Assembly, and 11 measures in Assembly Taxation, all of them Senate bills.

The focus of the remainder of the legislative session will be on those measures — particularly in the Assembly, which has both the governor’s proposed business tax and the measure renewing and making permanent the sunset taxes that balanced the current budget. Between the two, those measures are predicted to generate more than $1.3 billion to balance the governor’s proposed budget.

A compromise version of the business tax is expected to be introduced Monday or Tuesday and leadership says they believe it will have the support needed to escape the Assembly.