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With the passage of the "Microstamping" bill by the California state senate, gun ownership in California moves a microstep closer to death by a thousand cuts. The situation in the Granola State is a fascinating illustration on how civilian disarmament in this country could finally be effected.
If one reads the gun boards, one constantly hears the chest-thumping affirmations of keyboard heroes who are never going to give up their guns. Offering up their visions of how they will resist the UN gun confiscation teams which are apparently going to land in their black helicopters to go door to door looking for guns, they blithely ignore the attack that is already underway. The strategy is threefold:
Make gun ownership a hassle. Require permits to buy, to sell, to carry, to shoot. Make these permits cost money. Make people stand in line. Make them buy heavy safes or clunky locks. Dictate how they may store the weapon, transport the weapon, dispose of the weapon. Charge for all of this. Make it expensive and annoying.
Make gun ownership non-hereditary. Teach kids that guns are bad. Encourage kids to tell authority figures, such as school teachers or policemen, whenever they see anything involving a gun that seems bad or wrong. Make sure that the very presence of the gun itself is bad or wrong.
Make the gun business unprofitable. Require onerous fees, outrageous zoning requirements, inane engineering changes in the name of "safety". Keep the legal pressure on to drain profits, while at the same time restricting advertising to stifle income.
The fruits of this are already apparent in California, where citizens can't own lots of guns that would otherwise be legal, simply because gun manufacturers are unwilling or unable to submit examples of every possible combination of caliber, color, and barrel length to the California DOJ for destructive testing just to get on the approved list. If the latest "microstamping" nonsense passes, expect more manufacturers to just drop California as a market. Californian gun nuts try to reassure each other that gunmakers would never abandon them entirely; that they represent too large a market, that they subsidize gun owners in the rest of the country. To that, all I can say is that Bushmaster, DPMS, and Olyarms gave up on CA a while back, and they seem to be doing okay.
California, seen as a progressive state by the victim disarmament crowd, is their test lab; the thin end of the wedge of laws they'd like to try elsewhere. Thus far it's not working, not spreading to other states the way they'd like it to, but that doesn't mean that gun owners elsewhere in America can stop watching that train wreck on the left coast; it contains lessons needed to stop our rights here from being derailed.
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