BREAKING: This State Just Voted to Ban Guns

While no one was looking, California just passed radical gun control legislation. As Townhall reports:

Townhall is on the ground in Louisville for the National Rifle Association’s Annual Meeting, a three-day gathering of pro-Second Amendment supporters that’s expected to attract tens of thousands of people. And it looks like it couldn’t have begun at a better time, as California is emerging as a leader for anti-gun legislation. A string of pro-gun control measures passed yesterday, which gun rights advocates have called “gun-megeddon” (via LA Times):

The state Senate on Thursday approved sweeping new restrictions on using guns in California in response to the December mass shooting by two terrorists that left 14 dead in San Bernardino.

Lawmakers approved 11 bills including measures mandating background checks for Californians buying ammunition and outlawing the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines.

The bills, which next go to the Assembly for consideration, represent the most ambitious effort at gun control in decades in California, which already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.

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The measures banning rifles with detachable magazines and requiring background checks for ammo buyers are opposed by the National Rifle Assn., Gun Owners of California and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry.

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Two of the bills approved by the Senate would ban the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines as well as semiautomatic, center-fire rifles with “bullet buttons,” a recessed button that, when pressed by a sharp object, allows removal of the magazine.

Those already possessing such guns would have to register them with the state as assault rifles.

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Yet another bill approved Thursday, authored by De León [Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León (D-Los Angeles)], would require those buying ammunition to present identification, which would be used by the seller to check to make sure the buyer is not a felon or otherwise prohibited from possessing guns.

This is nothing more than another bill that will reduce the gun rights of law abiding citizens while disregarding the age old notion that criminals are gonna criminal. These laws passed in large part due to public concern that something like the massacre in San Bernardino might happen again. But the guns used in the San Bernardino massacre were already illegal under state law. So were the pipe bombs, for that matter., and so is the advanced weaponry that rival gangs use to wipe each other out in California's worst cities.

Tragedies cause people to abandon rationality and demand that the government "do something!" that helps them feel safe. Our constitution anticipates the rise of irrational mass movements and limits the ways in which they strip the individual of his inalienable rights. In this case, a mass movement has come along to advance the utopian fantasy that prohibiting guns will make them magically disappear. The right of every Californian to defend themselves and their families from those that would do them harm now hangs in the balance.

Source: AAN