Confiscation Coming to a California City Near You.

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California governor Jerry Brown signed a new law yesterday that “aims” to help protect the people of California. According to LA Times writer Patrick McGreevy, SB 140 is designed to help the state remove guns from the homes of people who have committed felonies, have been deemed mentally unstable, and/or some one who has a restraining order issued against them. The weapons in question are not weapons that the person may have obtained illegally but are weapons that were purchased and properly registered before the crime was committed, or the person was deemed to be a harm to himself or others.

On the surface I really don’t have any problems with this law, the state is taking a proactive stance on removing weapons from people who are not legally allowed to own them. The Supreme Court has in the past confirmed the rights of the state to prevent the mentally ill person or the felon from purchasing or owning firearms. So California exercising this right seems perfectly reasonably.

I do have several problems with this bill however, first is how the bill is to be funded. 24 million dollars will be taken from the background check fees of people who are purchasing a new weapon. The attorney general has been authorized to raise the background check fee by 10% to help raise the money required to fund this bill. In short, law abiding gun owners will carry the sole burden of funding SB 140.  This small portion of the population is now responsible to protect all of California. In my opinion this is just one more tax on the purchase of firearms. The funding of SB 140 should have been from the General Fund that all taxpayers pay into. If we add 10% here and 10% there to the background fee or five cents here and there on ammo then gun ownership will eventually get to a point of being cost prohibitive. 

My second concern is the mental illness restriction, currently the mental illness section only covers persons who have been institutionalized or have been found not guilty by reason of insanity to a crime, not to mention there is also a section that allows a person to get his gun owning rights back by petitioning the courts. Even the most pro gun person would certainly have to agree that this is not too unreasonable.  Where my concern comes to play is what happens when the mental health section is changed, will PTSD, ADHD, ADD, and the myriad of anti-social disorders be included in the “harm to self or others” category.

Again, while I agree with most of the bill, I have a hard time believing that this is not the first in a series of laws making gun ownership more and more difficult. We are raising the overall cost of guns. What happens when the word household is added to the mental illness restriction, now you are denied owning a gun because someone else may have been mentally ill?