Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Democrat politicians in California want to disarm their citizens. That is old news. A decade ago the California legislature imposed certain safety features on handguns. The legislature also required that manufacturers pay a fee and submit samples of their products to the state. The official rationale for this gun-control was to establish a roster of so called “safe” handguns. Only the approved firearms could be sold at gun stores. The infringement on the right to bear arms is so obvious that only a judge could miss it. Watch this if you have doubts.
You can buy an “unsafe” firearm at a gun store if you are a law enforcement officer or on a list of approved state employees. You read that correctly. Police don’t need “safe” firearms, but you and I do. The guy who walks down the street with a gun on his hip needs to be less safe than your neighbor who has her gun locked in a safe next to her bed. What do judges drink at night to accept these excuses?
Firearms manufacturers can only add a new gun to the California roster if their gun has all the newly required safety features. Unfortunately, there are no guns in existence that have all of them. None. Of the thousands of different models of firearms sold all across the country, not one of them meets the California requirements. Naw, that doesn’t sound like a restriction on the right to keep and bear arms at all, does it?
You can buy an older model gun that is considered safe enough, but you can only buy it because it was grandfathered onto the roster. You can not buy a contemporary firearm that is demonstrably safer than its earlier cousins because the safer gun is “unsafe.” Does this sound like the ministry of truth to you?
There are work-arounds as you would expect. The receiver is the serialized part of a firearm that is legally considered to be “the gun”. On contemporary handguns, that is usually the assembly that includes the grip and the trigger assembly. All the other parts are merely accessories. That means you can buy an older model gun on the roster and build from there. You strip the older parts and replace everything with new parts except the serialized receiver. This is like keeping your old license plate and calling your car an antique. Did a judge really think this kept us safe?
There are exceptions. You can buy a contemporary “unsafe” gun from a police officer in a person-to-person sale. That somehow makes the gun safer than if you bought it over the counter at a federally licensed gun store?
Criminals don’t buy their guns from federally licensed gun stores. The crooks steal their guns or buy them from the drug dealer down the street. In a state with wide open borders and thriving drug gangs, legislators said they would control the behavior of violent criminals by regulating the actions of honest citizens. How long do you have to live in an ivory tower to believe that? Can you even see the ground from up there?
This exercise in propaganda would be interesting if it weren’t so lethal. Across the United States, several thousand honest gun owners defend themselves with a firearm every day. Many of those gun owners live in California. More honest citizens would have defended themselves from criminal violence if the state allowed them to be armed. Disarming the people who obey the law makes them easier victims.
Last week, Federal judge Cormac Carney ruled that the California handgun roster was unconstitutional. The state has 14 days to appeal the decision or the judge’s injunction will go into effect. The judge pointed to the recent US Supreme Court ruling to justify his decision (Bruen). In fact, the recent Supreme Court ruling was on issuing firearms licenses. The relevant US Supreme Court decision on firearms regulation was issued back in 2008 (Heller).
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals covers California, and many of California’s firearms laws have been appealed since 2008. I have no idea how many more decades it will take until judges start following the law. Based on the legal evidence, it appears any excuse will do when the state wants to restrict your right to keep and bear arms.