If you have to ask, probably banned

Guns are once again being targeted by California lawmakers this year, though the pace of anti-weapons legislation, seemingly on automatic for decades, has ebbed.

In previous sessions, you could scan for bills and come up with at least 100 that mentioned the word “weapon.” A search today yields 33 such bills, though the number could grow by the end of session in the fall.

Last week, a measure advanced that would bar concealed weapon permit holders from bringing their firearms to school and college campuses without permission from the school. The bill moved through a bipartisan Senate committee and on to the state Assembly.

Current law allows properly licensed individuals to carry in those places.

Other bills regarding weapons include:

• State lawmakers have tried to make sure BB and pellet guns are colorful enough for cops to discern them from the real deal.
• Under another measure, criminals convicted of firearms-related misdemeanors would be unable to possess or purchase a gun within 10 years of their conviction.
• A registered gun owner’s home address would be protected from public disclosure under Assembly Bill 1154.
• Another bill would reduce the fee for weapons licensure for members of the Armed Forces from $40 to $25.

Meanwhile, the courts are sorting out lingering issues from earlier legislation.

Those include a challenge to a requirement that gun owners in San Francisco keep their firearms stowed in a lock box in their homes, or disable them with a trigger lock, unless they’re physically carrying them. The U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled last week to consider a review of a lower court ruling against the plaintiffs, who sought to repeal the policy.

And of course there’s the “smart gun” bill from 2013, which would require owner-specific, microstamping technology on guns so that only the owner of the weapon could fire it. The requirement is on hold pending the outcome of a federal lawsuit from a gun rights group. The state prevailed in the lower courts, and the case is now on appeal.

California has some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, requiring background checks on all gun sales and banning a growing list of assault weapons — an issue explored in detail recently by the pro-gun rights site guns.com.

In recent years, crime in the Golden State has fallen while gun sales have exploded.

Sales more than doubled between 2008 and 2014, from 425,244 in 2008 to 931,037 last year, according to data collected by the state. Handgun sales went from 208,312 in 2008 to 512,174 in 2014.

[Related: Banned guns not the ones used in crimes]

Regardless, some could say the state’s firearms policies are working.

A report by the state’s Department of Justice noted that from 2012 to 2013, “every violent and property offense category decreased in number and rate per 100,000 population.”

According to the report, the violent crime rate fell, and the homicide rate, after climbing 4.2 percent in 2012, dropped 8 percent in 2013 to 4.6 murders per 100,000 people.

The crime rate has dropped before, as in 2010 when the statistics were trotted out and Gov. Brown said that “crime remains a serious problem in California, and law enforcement officials at every level must redouble their efforts to ensure public safety.” Even back in 2006, the state had relatively low levels of crime, ranking 14th in the U.S. for violent crimes.

Some have pointed to the firearm prohibition laws as the reason for the drop.

“At a domestic level, California is a prime example of legal reform curbing gun violence,” wrote Isaac Saidel-Goley in a report in February at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy’s Harvard chapter. “Over the past 20 years, California – along with a few other states, including Massachusetts and New York – has pioneered the domestic implementation of gun control by passing laws enacting widespread firearm regulation, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, prohibiting individuals from openly carrying firearms in public, prohibiting domestic violence abusers from acquiring firearms, and establishing numerous firearm safety standards.

“These gun control laws have achieved remarkable success in preventing gun violence.”

Gun advocates, however, credit the increase in weapons purchased, a theory advanced in the 1998 book by academic John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

“California must allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms in public, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, striking down the core of the state’s permit system for handguns.

“In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said San Diego County violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment by requiring residents to show “good cause” — and not merely the desire to protect themselves — to obtain a concealed-weapons permit.”

Studies by John Lott and others gun scholars have shown that, when states adopt conceal-carry laws, crime drops. That’s because criminals don’t care about gun laws. And their criminal connections provide them with plentiful illegal guns.

All disarming citizens does is provide easy marks for criminals, because the chance of the victim defending himself is limited.

But with conceal carry, criminals don’t know who is armed, and who isn’t. Any potential victim, even a grandma with a purse, could be packing heat.

As we used to say in my U.S. Army days 35 years ago — outstanding!

By John Seiler

This is heroic. The sheriffs in Clackamas County in Oregon have been eating too many donuts while waiting for their pensions. So crime has been rising. Now, the residents of Jennings Lodge neighborhood are taking their defense into their own hands: They declared it a “Glock Block,” protected by residents with conceal-carry permits packing heat. According to KOIN.com:

“‘We’re starting a new group,’ said Coy Tolonen, who lives in unincorporated Clackamas County. ‘We don’t feel neighborhood watch is sufficient, and we don’t feel the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office is sufficient.’

“Tolomon and a group of Jennings Lodge neighbors say they’re responding to escalating crime on their block by also making fliers that read ‘This is a Glock block. We don’t call 911.’

“It’s mostly petty crime that neighbors are sick and tired of:  stolen lawn ornaments, vandalism.  But for neighbors like Tolonen, a breast-cancer survivor, that’s enough: ‘I will defend myself — and my home,”’she told KOIN 6 News.

“Tolonen recently had a beloved statue she calls ‘Lilly Rose’ stolen off her front porch. She said she even saw the man who stole it and tried to chase him down — but he got away.

“This was the last straw for Tolonen, who decided to take a class to get her concealed carry permit.

“’I think more people should be trained, [with] permits to carry,’ she said.”

This would be impossible in most areas of California, because our laws allow local sheriffs to decide who gets a conceal-carry permit. And almost all sheriffs in populous areas keep the permits to a minimum. Even in “conservative” Orange County, Sheriff Sandra Hutchens has allowed very few permits. In fact, as gun scholar John Lott has proved, the drop in crime nationally the past 20 years largely is due to the spread of conceal-carry laws that have armed honest citizens against brutal criminals.

In California, the politicians want us to continue to be at the mercy of the brutal criminals.

Oregon, although a liberal “Left Coast” Blue State, is much better on gun rights than California — and on taxes as well. It has no state sales tax. And its income tax rates are lower than California’s.

Oregon — here I come!

Per the Bee:

Gun deaths and injuries have dropped sharply in California, even as the number of guns sold in the state has risen, according to new state data. Dealers sold 600,000 guns in California last year, up from 350,000 in 2002, according to records of sale tallied by the California Attorney General’s office. During that same period, the number of California hospitalizations due to gun injuries declined from about 4,000 annually to 2,800, a roughly 25 percent drop, according to hospital records collected by the California Department of Public Health.

By John Seiler

In the following YouTube, America’s top gun scholar, John Lott, faces off against two gun-control fanatics who hardly let him get in a word edgewise. One is host Piers Morgan, who like a lot of Brit expatriates thinks America would be a fantastic country if it became a lot more like Britain. But Britain today is an Orwellian police-state hellhole.

The other is Alan Dershowitz, the leftist Harvard Law prof, best known for helping O.J. Simpson beat a murder rap. In all his screaming, Dershowitz didn’t note that, if Nicole Brown Simpson had been carrying a handgun when O.J. attacked her with a knife, she would be alive today and O.J. wouldn’t.

And note that Dershowitz wants to take away all our guns. Imagine what a Nazi government would be needed to take more than 300 million guns from Americans.

By the way, you can get Lott’s book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” through Amazon Kindle for just $5.13.

By Wayne Lusvardi

President Barack Obama’s “stimulus” flying saucer landed in California in February 2009. This isn’t something from Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” It’s the actual description from Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist.

Krugman is quoted in the new book, “Debacle: Obama’s War Against Jobs and Growth,” by John Lott and Grover Norquist. Lott is a well-known economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a taxpayer advocacy group.

Krugman:

“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.  And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better off.”

Thirty-eight months later, there is, as predicted, a growing state budget deficit and looming inflation from California’s new green laws. But there is no significant economic recovery, either.  In fact, California may be headed for a double-dip recession in 2013 and 2014. What happened?

We thought by now that the space aliens from “Planet O” would have won California’s war over global warming, its water wars and its war against Proposition 13.  For as former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want to see a crisis go to waste.”  So the Mortgage Meltdown of 2008 was used as an excuse to run around Prop 13, home rule, and eventually California’s Constitution.  Government avoided having to adjust wages, home prices and public pensions from inflated levels during the Mortgage Bubble.  Now it has announced it is running a $16 billion deficit. California’s budget flying saucer just doesn’t want to come back down to planet earth.

The federal stimulus program ended in July 2011.  But 2012 is an election year.  So Obama and California Attorney General Kamela Harris have shaken down commercial banks for another $18 billion bailout in the guise of a foreclosure fraud settlement.  To do this, California must circumvent its State Constitutional ban on giving a “gift of public funds” to homeowners. But who cares about the rule of law? Obama will do anything to get elected. Obama’s economic stimulus movie might as well have been written, produced and directed on a stage set in Hollywood.  But it died at the box office.

California’s decline due to stimulus

Lott and Norquist have written a well-documented book on why Obama should not be re-elected, due to his poor track record on jobs and economic growth.  Though they don’t provide any specifics on California in their new book, the chapters of their book could easily be applied to California:

Chapter 1: The Financial Crisis — California is ground zero of the foreclosure crisis as shown by the $25 billion foreclosure settlement funds coming to California.

Chapter 2: The Worst Recovery on Record — California is lagging behind every other state in economic recovery.

Chapter 3: The Stimulus Made Things Worse — the stimulus postponed the reduction of government wages, home prices and public pensions resulting from the Mortgage Bubble that would have brought about a rapid recovery.

Chapter 4: Would the Economy Have Been in Worse Shape without the Stimulus? — The foreclosure fraud settlement will prolong California’s recession and circumvent the constitutional prohibition against giving homeowners a gift of public funds.  The federal Department of Energy’s $535 million loan guarantee to California-based solar panel manufacturer Solyndra ended up with the company taking the money and jumping on a flying saucer as soon as the loan was approved.

Chapter 5: Regulatory Thuggery — Due to a federal EPA crackdown on fracking permits — oil drilling by hydraulic fracturing of rocks — California’s oil well permits dropped from 71 in 2009 to 7 in 2011, a 90 percent drop.

Obama’s war against jobs and growth

When Obama was elected in 2008, it gave Democrats a supermajority.  Obama signed Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s H.R. 146 — San Joaquin River Restoration Act — as part of the Omnibus Lands Act of 2009.  This bill transferred contracted water from San Joaquin Valley farmers to commercial fishing, recreation, lodging and real estate development interests in a water grab.

The amount of data and documentation Lott and Norquist have amassed won’t convince their opponents if all the reader reviews at Amazon.com are any example.  No matter how convincing this book is, the text is bound to make opponents only more prone to denial and strengthen their opposition. Social psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance” — information at odds with one’s core beliefs that threaten one’ livelihood or social status typically results in one’s beliefs only getting stronger.

But reality still intrudes. As Lott and Norquist show, another four years of Obama would drive the economic train off a cliff — with California riding in the first car.

California obviously is a divide state that ought to be divided in two — at least. That clearly is shown in the following map of how easy to get a concealed carry weapon’s permit in California. The map is from California Concealed Carry Weapon, a great group that promotes the right to carry a gun.

California is a “may issue” state, meaning each county sheriff determines who gets the permits. As you would expect, the counties on the Left Coast issue almost no permits. While the counties in the more sensible interior of the state make it easy to get a permit.

The anomaly is Orange County, which is conservative Republican, but has a gun-control fanatic as sheriff, Sandra Hutchens, whom foolish voters re-elected in 2010.

It’s typical that the Left Coast doesn’t understand that, as the title of gun scholar John Lott’s book put it, “More Guns, Less Crime.” (Now available for just $3.42 on Kindle.)

The reason is that, when honest, law-abiding citizens carry concealed guns, criminals don’t know which potential victim is armed, and which unarmed. So crime goes down.

Here’s the map. It’s obvious that the green, freedom-loving areas should be split off from the red, repressive, pro-criminal areas.

Jan. 3, 2012