USA – -(Ammoland.com)- AB-1927, “Firearms: California Do Not Sell List,” introduced Jan. 24 by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, purports “to allow a person who resides in California to voluntarily add his or her own name to the California Do Not Sell List,” prohibiting dealers from selling them a gun. Ostensibly offered as an answer to California suicides involving guns, the measure will, among other things, “make it a crime, punishable as a misdemeanor or a felony, to transfer a firearm to a person who is validly registered on California’s Do Not Sell List.”
“I don’t get it,” a puzzled comment poster to an SF Gate report on Bonta’s bill admitted, reflecting a sentiment shared by many. “If they wanted to exclude themselves from buying a gun, wouldn’t they just not buy a gun?”
That’s a fair question, not that Bonta’s bill has a chance of accomplishing stated goals. Of course, it does not, and it goes far beyond just affecting the person who self-reports.
It also makes a criminal of the transferor. The text of the bill does not warn that people “voluntarily” adding their names to the list will be, in effect, self-incriminating if they try to buy (or even touch) a gun afterward. Nor does it specify safeguards and penalties against identity theft and “false positives” that result in a wrong person being denied.
As for the bill “allow[ing] a person registered on the list to file a petition in Superior Court requesting to have his or her name removed from the registry,” that assumes they have the wherewithal to do that. With the bar for a removal order being “a hearing [that] establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that he or she is not at elevated risk of suicide,” it’s fair to ask if all Californians have the resources to persist through such a process, and if all hearings will present standardized and equal opportunities to prevail.
More likely, because “suicide rates in the U.S. are closely correlated to poverty rates,” minority groups in Bonta’s Oakland constituency trying to get their rights restored would be “disenfranchised” compared to well-heeled “liberals” across the bay in “white-privileged” Marin County.
There’s one other oversight, if it really is one, and that’s what to do about those who enforce California’s citizen disarmament laws.
“National law enforcement suicide rates run between 18 and 22 per 100,000; the general population’s rate is about 11 per 100,000,” the Los Angeles Daily News reported in 2007.
That, in turn, raises the possibility that a disproportionate number of people who shouldn’t have guns are being deployed. It also means employment law legalities could be raised if an officer self-reports.
None of which matters to Assemblyman Bonta. After all, we’re talking about a guy who led the charge to keep and protect communists in state government, a move no doubt made more understandable by his own family ties with foreign enemies who “advocated the forceful overthrow of both the United States and Philippines governments.”
Giving apparatchiks like him the reins of political power is the surest way of committing cultural suicide, and California Democrats appear ready to lead the way.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.