The Sacramento Bee covers the story, with a great quote from Larry Keane:
“California will become like Cuba with cars,” said Lawrence Keane, senior counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the gun industry. “You will only be able to get very old models of guns.”
According to the story the number of pistols approved in California is already falling, and is expected to fall even further. The gun hating politicians of the Golden State should pat themselves on the back. It would appear they’ve successfully achieved the “handgun freeze” that was rejected 2-1 by California voters back in 1982. A losing issue can be turned into a winning one if you do it over time, slowly enough that no one notices until it’s too late.
“In 2007, a [CA] law took full effect mandating that new center-fire semi-automatic pistols include both a mechanism that prevents firing when the magazine is removed, as well as an indicator showing when a live round is in the gun chamber. Rim-fire semi-automatics must have the magazine disconnect device.”
It’s telling that these laws, which are clearly intended to restrict access to firearms, are done in the name of increasing user safety. This is the same tactic that been used to degrade our civil rights in other areas since 9/11, but with a different crowd promoting the infractions in each case. Whenever somebody says they’re taking away freedoms for your own protection, try to remember if you’re over 18 it’s none of their concern. If we could just get the left & right to both respect the basic tenets in the Bill of Rights we might have a chance to protect our liberties. As it is, both wings of the political spectrum feel free to intrude on our rights, just under different pretenses of protecting us from ourselves in different ways.
The only effect I would expect to see from these laws is increased smuggling of weapons into CA from Mexico & neighboring states to arm the drug gangs, which of course won’t be affected in the least by restricting access to firearms for honest citizens.
The CA law has a key requirement that microstamping technology be free from patent encumbrance. One should take Mr. Lizotte’s claims that he will free up his patents with a grain of salt. What he usually means is that the guns will not require a per gun fee, but the machine tools will be patent encumbered.
This will all be moot as soon as the Pena v. Cid case is allowed to move forward after McDonald is over as the state of California can’t ban half of the guns in common use for self defense.
-Gene
Not exactly. The 1982 handgun “freeze” would have banned all handguns, not just new models. The Cuba analogy works, though.