California gun owners: Beware
Bookworm on Apr 29 2008 at 10:50 am | Filed under: Gun control
Here is a message from the NRA:
Anti-gun hysteria has reached a fever pitch in the Golden State. The California Assembly is considering a bill (Assembly Bill 2062) this session that, if passed, will have dire consequences for California’s law-abiding gun owners.
AB2062 is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday, May 7 in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.Sponsored by State Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-45), AB2062 would require that law-abiding gun owners obtain a permit to buy handgun ammunition and would impose severe restrictions on the private transfers of handgun ammunition. Applicants for a “permit-to-purchase” would be required to submit to a background check, pay a $35 fee, and wait as long as 30 days to receive the permit.
Under AB2062, it would be unlawful to privately transfer more than 50 rounds of ammunition per month, even between family and friends, unless you are registered as a “handgun ammunition vendor” in the Department of Justice’s database. Ammunition retailers would have to be licensed and store ammunition in such a manner that it would be inaccessible to purchasers. The bill would also require vendors to keep a record of the transaction including the ammunition buyer’s name, driver’s license, the quantity, caliber, type of ammunition purchased, and right thumbprint, which would be submitted to the Department of Justice. Vendors would be required to contact the purchase permit database to verify the validity of a permit before completing a sale. All ammunition sales in the State of California would be subject to a $3 per transaction tax. Lastly, mail order ammunition sales would be prohibited. Any violator of AB2062 would be subject to civil fines.
Here’s what you can do to help protect our Second Amendment freedoms:
- Participate in NRA’s Virtual “Lobby-Day” on Tuesday, May 6 and tell the Assembly to stop supporting ill-conceived anti-gun proposals like AB2062.
- On Tuesday, May 6, call, fax, and email the Assembly between 9:00 AM until 4:00 PM and voice your opposition to more gun control proposals. Respectfully, tell your Assembly Member to oppose any assault on our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. To identify your Assembly Member and to get contact information, please click here. A roster of the entire Assembly can be found here.
- Firearms owners able to travel to the State Capitol will be visiting the legislative offices at the same time your calls, faxes, and emails will be arriving. Please be polite while you address your concerns! The combination of your calls, faxes, and emails, together with those personal visits, will show legislators that California’s firearms owners strongly oppose AB2062 and similar anti-freedom proposals.
- Forward this message to every gun owner you know and include all gun clubs, stores, ranges and Second Amendment groups. Please cross-post this on the internet on websites and firearm-related forums.
I have to admit that I never would have dreamed, a decade ago, that I would be serving as a conduit for the NRA. I’ve never handled a gun myself, and find them somewhat frightening. I know that guns in criminals’ hands are a huge problem. I also know that good people die in gun accidents all the time.
What I also know, though, is that the Constitution is not ambiguous about guns: The Founders saw government as the greatest threat to people and they wrote the Second Amendment with the idea that armed citizens could come together to protect themselves against a dangerous government — something I bet German Jews, Chinese intellectuals and Sudanese villagers all wish they could have done.
I know too that the NRA’s slogan — “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” — something that I always thought was superficial and glib, is absolutely true, as experiments in London and Washington, D.C. have both shown. Lastly, I know that, just as good people die in gun accidents, they also die in car accidents, yet no one would think to outlaw cars.
But to get back to the NRA’s action message. We know that, if the Legislature passes that law, it will instantly be challenged in Court. It will probably fail, although there is a possibility that it won’t. It will certainly cost the California taxpayers a great deal of money as California defends the indefensible. Isn’t it easier just to protest the proposed law now, before we go down that risky and expensive path?
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14 Responses to “California gun owners: Beware”
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I am becoming convinced some members of our legislature actively dislike me, and other responsible gun owners. A decade ago I too would have not thought the unthinkable, but now I am. Maybe it’s time to vote with my feet. The Reno area might be nice, I could still have the Sierras without the California legislature.
I’ve never handled a gun myself, and find them somewhat frightening.
It’s that old Democrat indoctrination training that has people think of firearms as being the weapons.
I grew up in a house with guns. When my father was a young man, he would occasionally kill time outside the barn by shooting rats with an old Folbert rifle. He had a selection of shotguns for hunting quail and pheasant. He had a .32 caliber revolver, and when he was doing whatever it was he was doing in Europe before and during WWII, he a couple of examples of the spook’s machine of choice, the 9mm Luger. (We were mad at them, but everybody in his line of work carried German guns: they were small, light, and indestructible.) When I was about ten years old, he bought me a Winchester 22. calibre rifle, and I was pretty good with it. Graduated to the handguns, and I was okay with them too - still am. My father was much older than my mother, so I never knew his father, but my other grandfather and all three of my uncles owned shotguns and rifles, and hunted the woods of upstate New York and Canada. They were all good shots and woodsmen - one of them was a great shot and woodsman: one of those Davy Crockett guys you could turn loose in the bush in autumn, and he’d walk out inthe spring a few pounds heavier. I own half a dozen firearms.
The above brief history of three generations of firearms in one family could be duplicated 50,000,000 times in this country. At least 50,000,000 times, that’s a conservative estimate. Nearly every farmer in the land owned at least a shotgun, many of them owned a shotgun and rifle, most probably owned a revolver or pistol, too.
Most of these people manage not to shoot anyone, either by accident or on purpose.
You find yourself somewhat frightened of guns, that’s normal. No one has ever argued that a firearm is not a potentially dangerous apparatus - what the hell else is it intended to be? We buy firearms, and have been buying them throughout the history of this land because of their lethal capacity, for sport, food, and for protection. Their use, these days, as a means to provide food is minimal, their sporting uses have not changed, and they are once again resuming their early indispensability as protection.
I never saw, or heard of, a gun leaping out of a bedstand drawer or jumping up off a table-top to kill someone. They are not by nature bloodthirsty. They are not by nature much of anything, except lumps of machined metal.
I am in favor of not making them available through the mail, buying into, I suppose, the argument that JFK was murdered with a mail-order rifle. That was the big emotional argument in my lifetime, that Kennedy had been killed - and oddly, not by a pisssed-off husband - and we should therefore all be disarmed. I don’t know where Leon Czolgosz obtained the weapon that killed McKinley, or Zangara the gun that killed the innocent bystander instead of FDR - but I do know that Lee Oswald learned to shoot while in the US Marines, and I do not regard that as an excuse for disbanding the Marines. he used a telescopic sight, so must we stop grinding lenses.
What’s going on in California is the usual dumb idea - normal for California - based on the usual faulty reasoning, and it will once again prove, as you say, that such laws and rules only apply to people who care about laws and rules. The criminals and gang members will remain undistrubed and undeterred, because of the simple fact, obvious to all but politicians: people who don’t care about the rules and laws won’t obey them.
Go haead, California: learn the hard way. Again.
I am an NRA member because of these kind of actions. Here in Illinois, to own weapons or ammunition, one is required to obtain a FOID card. Firearms Owner ID.The current cost is a mere 5 dollars. Had one when I was 12. I no longer have one because I will not be on a list.
OK folks. The 1st Amendment guarantees Freedom of the Press. Let’s outlaw ink!
How about we outlaw keyboards, as well. Or maybe you can only buy one key every thirty days, and you’ll have to get a special license to do so. And pay processing fees.
I’ll start with an ’s’.
[...] calls our attention to a message from the NRA about an alarming bill being considered by California’s left wing [...]
They’re somewhat frightening in the way that a chainsaw is somewhat frightening. There are safety rules, and if somebody really wants to go nuts with one they can, but if it’s just sitting there it’s not going to do anything on its own.
I learned to shoot a few years ago but these guys http://www.bayprofs.org/ had a good, inexpensive class that included range time if you have the urge to learn the basics. I did it just out of curiosity and realized I enjoyed target shooting and kept it up.
For the record, the Illinois FOID card to which rockdalian refers simply identifies an individual as being legally allowed to own, purchase and use firearms (i.e., no criminal record, no history of mental illness).
The State of Illinois does not register weapons and munitions purchases or otherwise identify whether or not you own a firearm. Although firmly opposed to gun registration in any form, I confess to being somewhat ambivalent on the FOID card’s merits. That being said, I strongly oppose many of the State of Illinois’ weapons restrictions, especially the ban on concealed carry and its opposition to “Castle Laws”.
[...] From the Bookworm Room: [...]
Book, how did you get the information release from the NRA? Are you a non-gun owning member?
In answer to your question, Danny, an in-law forwarded it to me. He too was once a loosey-goosey liberal, and now he’s a gun-owning, card-carrying NRA member. And I say “Good for him!”
Why don’ t you ask him to take you out shooting some time? It’s loads of fun and you meet nice people that way.
He lives far away, but we’ve talked about doing just that the next time I’m in his neck of the woods.