As reported at AmmoLand.com, the Firearms Policy Center has managed to pry loose the new “Bullet-Button Assault Weapon” registration regulations that the California Office of Administrative Law (COAL) and CAL-DoJ have been trying to hide (apparently in violation of the California Constitution and their Public Records Act). As the FPC’s lawyers said in their demand letter:
Currently, both DOJ and OAL are infringing the constitutional right of access to the conduct of the people’s government and denying review of the text of these submitted regulations … Access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state.
It’s almost as if the furtive bureaucrats hard-working public servants at CAL-DoJ don’t want people to know what the proposed regulations are in time to comment on them before they are promulgated.
The FPC created a webpage, BulletButtonBan.com, to keep the community up to date with The Golden State’s efforts to turn law-abiding gun owners into criminals, as well as the FPC’s efforts to keep the process transparent and lawful (or at least as lawful as efforts to restrict an enumerated civil right can be).
The fact is, according to FPC’s California lobbyist and spokesperson Craig DeLuz, CAL-DoJ has good reason to try try to conceal the regulations for as long as possible:
“At first glance, the DOJ’s latest package of ‘assault weapons’ regulations are as awful as their first attempt—it’s no wonder they wanted to hide them. The DOJ’s actions to keep the regulations secret were as undemocratic as they are unlawful,” concluded DeLuz.
My question is: why are the antis in the California legislature so bent out of shape that people have been obeying the law? According to the Santa Barbara Coalition Against Gun Violence, the ban forbade:
any ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with neither disassembly of the firearm action nor use of a tool being required.
According to Merriam-Webster, the primary definition of a tool is “a handheld device that aids in accomplishing a task” so, literally by definition, requiring a bullet tip or other ‘tool’ to remove a magazine fulfills the law’s requirement. But try telling that to the antis.
We saw the same thing with the Clinton scary black rifle ban; legislators pass a law banning certain cosmetic features or requiring certain design changes. Being good corporate citizens, gun manufacturers adapted; they changes the designs of their products in order to comply with the new law.
You’d think that the antis would be happy, but no. Instead they jump up and down, yelling and screaming that by redesigning their products these companies aren’t obeying the law, that they’re ‘evading’ or ‘getting around’ it. Or (my personal favorite) that by conforming with by selling newly compliant products, these companies are ‘exploiting a loophole.’
That’s because “common-sense” safety regulations were never the goal. The antis won’t be happy until they’ve managed to outlaw all semi-automatic firearms. Whereupon Smith & Wesson, Ruger and others will come out with a pump action AR-15’s and the dance will start all over again.