In 2016, Wyoming Gun Owners (WYGO) Executive Director Anthony Bouchard was elected to the Wyoming State Senate. Bouchard contacted his long time friend, Aaron Dorr, and asked him to take over the work of WYGO, just days before the start of the 2017 session.
WYGO was in some state of disarray at that time, and much of the 2017 legislative session was consumed with reorganizing the organizations paperwork with the IRS and the State of Wyoming.
But after having led the fight to pass Stand-Your-Ground law in Missouri (2016) and Iowa (2017,) and with Wyoming being the only western state without a Stand-Your-Ground law, Aaron was determined to pass this crucial legislation in Wyoming in 2018.
Throughout September and October, Aaron and Chris utilized their experience with this legislation after passing it in other states to assist Senator Bouchard in drafting what became the nation’s leading Stand-Your-Ground bill draft.
Once the bill was ready for ‘prime time,’ Aaron developed a pre-session mobilization program involving Facebook live videos, statewide emails, radio ads, digital ads and direct mail that had WYGO members flooding the Capitol with calls and email in support of this bill before the legislature even convened for their short 24 day session.
In the opening days of the 2018 session, WYGO’s Stand-Your-Ground legislation was filed with an incredible 36 combined cosponsors. LSO (Legislative Services Office) staff told Aaron that that was the highest number of cosponsors that they had ever seen on any bill ever!
Knowing how easy it would be for legislative leaders to tank this legislation, Aaron recruited a House sponsor for this legislation, as well. Representative Tim Salazar filed a mirror image of this legislation, giving WYGO two avenues to advance this legislation. This would prove to be invaluable in the coming weeks.
With thousands of emails pouring into the Capitol, lawmakers were certainly feeling the heat on this bill. But even in Wyoming, Michael Bloomberg’s forces were active, and spun wild-eyed stories of what would happen should Wyoming enact this legislation.
When asked to rebut the garbage that Bloomberg’s lobbyists were spewing out, Aaron led the committee testimony for WYGO members, testifying in three different committee hearings in the House and Senate.
You can watch one of these committee testimonies here, or by clicking below.
WYGO’s Aaron Dorr, testifying in support of Stand Your Ground law in front of the Senate Agriculture committee in March of 2018.
As Aaron ran the ground game in Wyoming racking up dozens of cosponsors, leading the committee testimony, and typing out email updates each night in his hotel room, Chris ran point on WYGO’s direct mail grassroots mobilization program.
(This was made easier to do because the Dorr Brothers have slowly but surely built up their own in-house direct mail company, allowing them to control costs for groups like WYGO and to ensure perfectly timed delivery. See more on that here.)
This resulted in a flood of petitions landing in politician’s physical and digital inboxes, reminding them that gun owners in their districts expected results on Stand-Your-Ground law during the 2018 session!
This program also provided critical funds that WYGO needed to deploy their radio and digital ad program, which helped us crank the heat up even more.
Some of the direct mail updates that WYGO sent out during the 2018 legislative session.
And we needed this pressure in Cheyenne, badly.
While it may seem like an easy task to pass Stand-Your-Ground law in a state like Wyoming, it wasn’t — as dozens of legislative moderates were trying to weaken the bill with hostile amendments.
Our House bill (HB 168) was making its way through the committee process without complications, at first.
In the Senate, SF 75 had cleared all of its committee hurdles and the first reading (first vote,) and was facing the second reading when Senator Drew Perkins filed a hostile 3 page long amendment that took out five key provisions of this legislation.
And what’s more, he did it just 45 minutes before the Senate was slated to vote on the amendment and the bill.
With nowhere near enough time to individually lobby 30 members of the Senate, Aaron wrote lobbyist notes to as many politicians as he could,
telling them that this amendment was hostile to the bill and that Wyoming Gun Owners would be scoring this amendment vote as an anti-gun vote.
Moderates in the Senate erupted.
Senator Tara Nethercott walked up to Aaron, shredded the note, and threw it at him in a childish display that told Aaron all he needed to know: Senate moderates were terrified that attacking Stand-Your-Ground law would hurt them in the August primaries.
So while the hostile amendment passed that morning (February 26, 2018,) Senator Bouchard drafted a clean up amendment late that night for WYGO. That amendment was filed onto the third reading of the bill, which passed the very next day, undoing most (but not all) of the damage that Senator Perkins inflicted on the bill.
With time running out, Aaron decided that the House version was the stronger bill and the decision was made to drop SF 75 and put all of WYGO’s pressure behind HB 168. Three days later, HB 168 was passed through both chambers and sent to Governor Matt Mead’s desk.
But Matt Mead was no friend to gun owners.
In fact, the previous year, he vetoed WYGO’s legislation (HB 137) that would have done away with deadly ‘gun free zones’ in Wyoming, as a favor to the University of Wyoming.
More than that, Mead had been publicly attacking Stand-Your-Ground law in the media and behind the scenes for two weeks straight. His signature was no guarantee.
A full page ad that Michael Bloomberg ran across Wyoming in late March, urging Governor Mead to veto Stand-Your-Ground law!
Knowing this, Michael Bloomberg’s lobbyists immediately commissioned digital and full page newspaper ads, designed to pressure Mead into vetoing this bill.
WYGO went to work with our own email and digital program, pouring over 2,500 emails into Mead’s office in just a few days.
Mead had three options.
He could veto the bill. He could sign the bill. Or he could take no action on the bill.
If he took the latter option, the bill would automatically become law 72-hrs after it landed on his desk.
Of course, Mead refused to tell us or even Rep. Salazar (the sponsor of the bill) what he was going to do with the bill.
Aaron confronted Governor Mead at a bill signing session, asking him what he was going to do with the bill and reminding him that for a guy who was term limited and rumored to be seeking higher office, vetoing a bill as popular as Stand-Your-Ground law would be a stupid move.
The next day, March 14, 2018, Governor Mead informed Rep. Salazar that he would not veto the bill and would allow it to become law without his signature — making Wyoming the 36th Stand-Your-Ground law state in America!
Senator Bouchard and Representative Salazar were quick to thank WYGO members and the work of the Dorr Brothers for the success of this effort.
WYGO’s Aaron Dorr with Senator Anthony Bouchard (middle) and Representative Tim Salazar (right) doing a victory lap video the morning after Stand-Your-Ground legislation passed into law.
WYGO would go on, later that year, to attack moderate Republicans who opposed this (and other pro-gun legislation) during the August primaries, sending the message to lawmakers in Cheyenne that there is a price to be paid for betraying gun owners.
To read about WYGO’s 2018 primary election program, go here.
To read about WYGO’s 2020 battle to stop a Republican push for FIX-NICS mental health gun control as well as a Republican-backed effort to institute a waiting period on handgun sales in Wyoming, go here.