Don's Tuesday Column

        THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   2/04/2020

Bullet control futility; Trump polls

You could not have a better illustration of the futility of anti-2^nd Amendment laws than the ludicrous ammunition restrictions in California since last July. As explained in “California’s new ammo law hurts the wrong people—and doesn’t stop ‘bad guys’ with guns,” by Holly A. Heyser (12/21, The Sacramento Bee), we now have real controls over that without which a handgun is just a paperweight and a long gun is just a club.

“When California started requiring people to pass background checks to buy ammunition on July 1, hunters hoped for the best and braced for the worst. What happened was far worse than we feared. The premise of the new law is that people who can’t have guns shouldn’t have ammo either. I don’t know anyone who disputes that. Bad guys shouldn’t have guns or ammo.

“The law says if you do not appear on a prohibited-persons list and you have passed a background check to buy a gun during the time the state has stored those records in a database, you can buy ammunition. Simple, right? Here’s where it fell apart: The state Department of Justice finalized regulations to implement the law just before it took effect. There was no time, and no effort, to raise awareness, no time for gun owners to verify they were in the database and, most critically, that their ID matched their information in the database.

“In the first four months, the checks thwarted 101 ammunition purchases by prohibited persons, and a staggering 62,000 purchases by people who had every right to buy ammunition. More than half of the rejections were due to data mismatches, such as an address change; one-third were because buyers weren’t in the database. That’s 620 good guys for every bad guy.

“My friends who favor more gun control always tell me, ‘Holly, we don’t want to infringe on your rights. We just want to stop the bad guys.’ This law sure didn’t work out that way.”

 That impersonal database—to keep bullets out of the wrong hands—depends on current, accurate information. It turns a simple “Throw a couple boxes of rounds onto the counter,” when checking out of a sporting goods store with camp supplies, into a potential hunting trip dead end.

Just a (hypothetical) example from personal experience: A few years back, while in Oregon enjoying our duplex, we looked into replacing a defunct CCW handgun, avoiding sales tax. The address in the Oregon database was outdated, an oversight not easily corrected on a Sunday. The gun could not be bought; the verification laws worked. But we’re “good guys.”

With the “miracle” of a laptop and local wifi, we corrected the database to reflect our abode, as shown on a driver’s license. Without that technological wonder, we might have had to wait for another trip north for the purchase. The “right to bear arms” was almost denied to law-abiding citizens.

Now, imagine the unnecessary inconvenience of those 62.000 (now certainly many times that) legal gun owners that found out they couldn’t buy ammo simply due to dated or erroneous records. The miniscule number of criminals that were thwarted didn’t remove an illegal gun, let alone ammo. Having little regard for the law, they’ll use a “straw buyer” just like they do for their guns. It’s those who value obeying the law that suffer.

Defenders of the new ammo law blithely compare it to going through a TSA check at an airport, as if turning away large numbers of people, erroneously on a “no fly” list, when they’re about to board is reasonable. Rejected ammo purchasers included “cops, active-duty military, concealed weapon permit holders (who undergo rigorous background checks) and septuagenarians who like to go bird hunting a couple times a year. They may not learn why they were denied. They must navigate a confusing system for getting into the good-guy database or updating their name or address. The agency that denied them won’t talk to them…

“The absurd rejection rate isn’t the only problem. The new background check rules apparently have no provisions for non-California residents who want to buy ammunition in the state… Based on data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in 2018-19, more than 7,300 non-residents spent $1.2 million here on hunting licenses, in addition to other travel expenses. What are they supposed to do?

“And people who don’t own guns – like many new hunters – can’t get into the state database, so until they buy a gun, they must pay $19 for a background check that can take days, every time they buy ammunition, even for a $15 box of bird-hunting shells.” Want to buy handgun, bird or large animal ammo in another state (or borrow it)? That makes you a criminal upon returning to California. Absurd!

Some quick takes: Those massive fires in Australia result, not from global warming or climate change, but from the same neglect of, and prohibitions against, clearing out flammable brush that destroy our forests. Read “Appeasement: The Root Cause of the Australian Mega-Fires,” by Charles Rotter, 1/17.

Did you tune into any of the impeachment coverage, and scratch your head over seeing the factual Trump defenders, Democrat House managers’ false arguments, and the wildly off-base network news reporting? It was quantifiably slanted, as the Media Research Center found and wrote in “Evening News Spin: 100% Negative on Trump Defense, 95% Positive Dems.” ABC, NBC and CBS spent twice the time on the Dems—nearly all positive—as for Trump’s side, which was all negative.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval remains high at 49 percent, with black approval at 42%; a majority (52%) say don’t remove him but let voters decide (Rasmussen Reports). Prepare for “4 more years.”