I believe that a safer city, state, and nation, is a place where owning weapons is not only allowed but encouraged.
That’s my personal opinion but I’m not completely alone in that thinking.
I grew up in a place at a time when guns weren’t status symbols, or romanticized, or mystical. They were tools.
You respected any weapon, treated it as if it were loaded
If you didn’t know about how a particular model of gun worked… you asked. It was that simple. There were guns all over Dad’s house, all of them loaded, all unlocked and none in a safe.
A locked, unloaded, gun in a safe is completely and absolutely useless to anyone. Except the thief that manages to open the safe to take the guns and valuables to the local pawn shop.
There were no shootings, no children played cowboys & indians with a loaded weapon and the guns didn’t spontaneously go off randomly killing members of the family. We all knew from an early age what a gun was, and how to appropriately handle one if it came to protecting the family. Obviously, when there were toddlers around, the weapons were place out of reach.
I wasn’t going to comment on SB 249. I’ve been aware of it for a while and was not too interested. I knew it was another idiot gun ban bill that would probably fail or simply be ignored like so many Bills/Laws that are enacted in California.
Then I read the Bill…
This b
ill is one of those things that you just have to read to believe.
SB249. The link will download a PDF document. showing the amendments as of 2012 / 08 / 07.
This Link will take you to the original bill as introduced 2011 / 02 / 10 by California Senator Yee.
Part of what has caught my attention is how the bill has metamorphosed.
As introduced, it’s an agricultural bill that seems to be concerning itself with the business of a regional agricultural district and how members of a local association will be selected and appointed. This is standard stuff dealing with the business of governing California.
SB249 as it currently exists is about firearms.
Specifically, in it’s latest iteration if passed the bill could be used to remove almost any semi automatic weapons from law abiding citizens.
The Law and Lawyers are interesting. The definition of a word is EVERYTHING in law. Remember Bill Clinton and his request for clarification about what exactly defines sex?
Think about it.
What is Sex? Is sex defined as mans penis in a woman’s vagina? If that’s the definition you apply then mutual touching, oral and anal activities are not sex and therefore do not fall under any laws prohibiting adultery.
That’s why Sodomy laws are so very specific about the activities that are punishable offenses. Many Sodomy laws start out by defining ANYTHING that isn’t a mans penis in a woman’s vagina as sodomy and therefore punishable.
Masturbation falls under that definition so when your girlfriend gave you a quick hand job under the bleachers at the homecoming game you both could have been arrested.
I use sex here because it’s one of the easiest examples of how much turns on a definition. Mainly because the desire for puritanical control of who does what and to whom in the bedroom has led to some of the silliest laws ever.
Senator Yees Bill says and I quote;
“This bill would define “detachable magazine” for this purpose to mean any ammunition feeding device that can be removed from the firearm without disassembly of the firearm action, and to include a magazine that may be detached from the firearm by depressing a button on the firearm either with the finger or by use of a tool or a bullet.”
This paragraph isn’t talking specifically about rifles or assault weapons. Because it’s defined “detachable magazine” as any ammunition feeding device it’s broadly encompassing almost any semi-automatic pistol, so called “Assault Rifles” and a number of hunting rifles including standard bolt action types.
At first glance you scan down the items that are listed as strictly forbidden (defined as an assault weapon) and you think “Oh it’s only AR-15s or AK replicas.
You even get to Item 18 (4) which says;
(4) A semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:
(A) A threaded barrel, capable of accepting a flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or silencer.
(B) A second handgrip.
(C ) A shroud that is attached to, or partially or completely encircles, the barrel that allows the bearer to fire the weapon without burning the bearer’s hand, except a slide that encloses the barrel.
(D) The capacity to accept a detachable magazine at some location outside of the pistol grip.
So you think “OK cool, my Glock, doesn’t meet all of those requirements so while this is a bad law it’s not going to take all my semi-automatic weapons away”.
Then you get to item 29 (5) which says;
(5) A semiautomatic pistol with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds
Again… this still doesn’t ban yo
ur normal Glock. But it’s ONE single word away from making the possession of a semi-automatic pistol illegal in California.
A Fixed magazine is a magazine that still requires tools to drop & reload. All that has to happen now is for Yee or one of his co-authors to delete the word “Fixed“.
Since most semiautomatics can take high capacity magazines which accommodate more than 10 rounds, if they delete fixed, then because your standard Glock, SIG, or S&W CAN have 11+ round magazines now they’re all banned in California.
Remember how the definition of a word is so important?
With the deletion of one single modifier, this law could be used to ban most weapons in California.
Yee goes on to open the door to unreimbursed confiscation of weapons but hasn’t actually written that into the bill as of yet. However, due to the rather broad definition of assault weapons, possession of any weapons defined under this law would become illegal.
Even if you’d purchased the weapon when it was legal to do so.
This brings up a constitutional issue. You’re not supposed to have to worry about something being made illegal after the fact.
Again, let me use sex as a vehicle for example.
You’ve got 10 children, some dimwit in the government makes it illegal to have more than 2 children.
Since you’ve got 10 you’ve obviously violated the law 8 times. That gets you and your wife 20 years in a detention / re-education camp and your children all get sent to the state run orphanage where they’re told they’ll be a scum underclass of workers all their lives because daddy and mommy couldn’t be socially responsible.
That’s why way smarter people than me set up a basic framework that was designed to protect the individual from abuses of power by the government.
Think about it… the “Founding Fathers” had been screwed over time and time again by an oppressive government that was all about power, privilege, and wealth.
It makes sense that those same men would want to prevent that kind of thing from happening in a country where they were trying to create a better system of government.
And lets be realistic here… that better form of government was a form of government that favored people like the founding fathers.
But here comes Senator Yee.
He knows better, and is wiser than our founding fathers. In the best interests of the people of California Senator Yee is willing to circumvent the constitution allowing an Ex post facto implementation of the law… just this once…
…to take the guns away. It’s for the good and safety of the people of California. Think of the children…
Well Senator Yee,
I’ll give my right to have a gun up, the day that no criminal in the united states has a gun.
Until then, having the ability to protect myself and my family is my first concern.
Apparently sometime in the past two weeks Senator Yee has pulled the bill. This doesn’t mean he can’t put it back on the docket.
The major point here is about gun control
But there’s another point that may actually be far more important.
This bill started out as an agriculture bill and is in some cases still listed as an agriculture bill.
This begs the question,
How many other innocent sounding bills are being voted on and PASSED that are eroding any of the myriad rights we believe are un-assailable?
Authors note: I’m sorry that this piece has been republished and edited so much. For some unknown reason when it published this morning it was really garbaged up. After taking the piece through three editors and finally stripping out and re-inserting most of the HTML code, it’s stable. There are line breaks and spacing that make no sense but the piece is readable. I’m not editing it anymore.
I am going to see if I can figure out what happened and why.