My Proposed Bill for the California Legislature

[donw]

"Shall not be infringed"

i would suggest to them:

1. LE, LEA and legislators should NOT be exempted from ANY firearms related legislation or laws.

2. existing law(s) are MORE than adequate to cover any situation.

3. hold the legislator personally responsible for any miscarriages of, misapplications of, or negative results thereof*, as a result of passage of said legislation.

it is fact that all mass murderers did nothing that is NOT covered by a law in existence.

an interesting caveat i heard on roger hedgecock, AM760, recently: virtually every mass killer since the 1980's, has been on anti-depressant drugs of some sort...

maybe legislators should 'regulate' prescribed drugs more than they are? it may have prevented at least three that have occurred in the past year or so...

*"negative results thereof" meaning: if a gun store/shop, or FFL, etc, loses their job or livelihood as a result of legislation, the legislator should be held personally, along with the legislature, responsible.

[mrdd]

Agreed, but that thought shouldn't stop anyone from speaking their mind on any issues, especially issues as important as these.

Don't get me wrong, I thought that your points were very good and valuable to state.

[dram]

As promised, I've made some changes to my proposal based on feedback I received here and elsewhere. The main changes are:

1) Modified the CCW language further to become a true shall-issue law.

2) Aligned training requirements for a firearms safety certificate to the current training requirements for a CCW;

3) Added a phase out period for current handgun safety certificate holders to avoid a training bottleneck;

4) Clarified cost breakdown for the written test and the certificate; and,

5) Cleaned up other sections of the California Penal Code to reflect the change from "handgun safety certificate" to "firearm safety certificate". This ensures that people who are currently exempt from having a handgun safety certificate remain exempt, including from the training, among other things.

[berto]

31650. (a) The certified instructor may charge a fee of twenty-five dollars ($25), fifteen
dollars ($15) of which is to be paid to the department pursuant to subdivision (c)

for
administration of each objective test.
(b) An applicant to renew a handgun firearm safety certificate shall be required to pass
the objective test. The certified instructor may charge a fee of twenty-five dollars ($25),
fifteen dollars ($15) of which is to be forwarded to the department pursuant to
subdivision (c) (d).
(c) The department may charge the certified instructor up to fifteen fifty dollars ($15)

($50)

for each new handgun firearm safety certificate issued by that instructor to cover
the department's cost in carrying out and enforcing this article, and enforcing the
provisions listed in subdivision (e) (f), as determined annually by the department.

(d) The department may charge the certified instructor up to fifteen dollars ($15) for
each renewal firearm safety certificate issued by that instructor to cover the department's
cost in carrying out and enforcing this article, and enforcing the provisions listed in
subdivision (f), as determined annually by the department.

(d)

(e) All money received by the department pursuant to this article shall be deposited
into the Firearms Safety and Enforcement Special Fund created pursuant to Section
28300.
(e) (f) The department shall conduct enforcement activities, including, but not limited
to, law enforcement activities to ensure compliance with the following provisions:
(1) Section 830.95.
(2) Title 2 (commencing with Section 12001) of Part 4.

(3) This part, except Sections 16965, 17235, and 21510.

Drop the charade.

Your changes still leave instructors losing money.

$25 fee to student

$15 to state, $10 to instructor.

$50 fee to instructor.

$50
-$10

-$40 to the instructor for each student.

Nobody works for free. Are you dense or is your real goal the creation of a program that nobody will complete thus making gun ownership impossible?

Troll elsewhere, the gig is up.

[dram]

Drop the charade.

Your changes still leave instructors losing money.

$25 fee to student

$15 to state, $10 to instructor.

$50 fee to instructor.

$50
-$10

-$40 to the instructor for each student.

Nobody works for free. Are you dense or is your real goal the creation of a program that nobody will complete thus making gun ownership impossible?

Troll elsewhere, the gig is up.

What this says is that the instructor can charge $25 to administer the written test. It says nothing about how much they can charge for the class.

[The Geologist]

Yet it IS unreasonable to require some form of identification to vote.

Why is it unreasonable to require ID to vote? How many times after an election do we find out that a dead guy voted 30 times in 10 different places? I think it's unreasonable to require ID to purchase cigs, and beer. Can't the clerk take my word for it that I'm old enough to purchase those products?

[phrogg111]

What this says is that the instructor can charge $25 to administer the written test. It says nothing about how much they can charge for the class.

That sounds like an overly burdensome fee to me.

Why should I need to pay people to teach me gun safety when I'm a veteran of 3 wars?

Any regulations are unconstitutional. "Shall not be infringed" includes overly burdensome fees.

[The Geologist]

don't all these laws violate 2A to begin with? "shall not be infringed" means what it says... how can the state regulate guns?

The Wyoming way

http://legisweb.state.wy.us/2013/Introduced/HB0104.pdf

[berto]

What this says is that the instructor can charge $25 to administer the written test. It says nothing about how much they can charge for the class.

Great. They're still operating at a loss on the paper. A loss that the instructor will have to make up on the required class. A cost that will be be an extra $40 on top of whatever the BS class costs for anybody wishing to exercise their 2A rights. Further burdening people financially is not the way to protect and increase our 2A rights. It is an easy way for the other side to chip away at 2A rights. Set the cost high enough and people do something else. A class here, a background check there, a fee for this, and a tax on that. As time goes on there are fewer participants and thus fewer people with an investment in protecting 2A. Your entire plan is off.

If you insist on this nonsense plan why not charge the instructor $15 for the card and let the instructor charge the student up to $25 like HSC?

[Librarian]

Roberti
Roos
Allen
Perata
Scott
Villaraigosa
Polanco
De Leon
Portantino
Yee
Skinner
Ammiano

Any legislator introducing a bill resembling what you propose will join that list.

Be sure to tell them so, when you drop off your proposal.

[OrenG]

I know a number members of the California Assembly. I have been thinking about using my connections to propose moderate gun law reforms that might actually have some ability to reduce the amount of gun crime. I'm interested in everyone's feedback so I can better understand the arguments people will have against this proposal so I can fix it or at least prepare my rebuttals.

Here is the first draft of one proposal I'm thinking about making. It does two things:
1) Makes California a shall-issue state for concealed carry permits; and,
2) Requires more extensive training prior to buying any firearm (and renames the "Handgun Safety Certificate" to "Firearm Safety Certificate".)

With this proposal, I'm trying to align the education requirements needed to purchase a gun with what's required for getting a CCW. Right now, there is almost no education requirement to purchase a gun in California, the current written test to get a handgun safety certificate is a joke. I'm proposing that the handgun safety certificate is a starting place for being able to buy a gun, but that prospective gun buyers would also have to take a 22 hour course of instruction (sixteen hours in the classroom and six hours on the range).

In addition, I've removed the requirement that CCWs must only be issued for "good cause". It is this "good cause" provision that most sherifs in California cite when rejecting CCW applications. I've also required that people applying for CCWs have the same training that's required for purchasing a gun (this is mostly so people aren't grandfathered in with their current guns and get issued a CCW without going through the training).

I thought about requiring that people have a firearm safety certificate to purchase ammunition as well, but stopped short there. I think this is the best way to ensure existing gun owners get the training required of new gun owners. However, I also think that requiring a firearm safety certificate to purchase ammunition will get a lot more push-back than anything else in this proposal.

My goal with these proposals is to reduce gun injuries by requiring better training for gun owners and enabling more law-abiding gun owners to be armed. Of course, this won't solve the entire issue, but it's a place to start.

By doing the emboldened, you are playing into the classic gun nut stereotype and tacitly agree that gun owners are the stereotypical hillbilly, red neck, reckless, irresponsible, shoot their guns up in the air on 4th of July type of people.

Anyone who's been to a gun range realizes this is obviously not true and the select few who are irresponsible with their firearms are also irresponsible people in many other ways.

Never mind the fact that every single firearm comes with an instruction manual that has printed in it, gun safety instructions, and if you're buying a used gun without a manual, you can request one from the manufacturer free of charge.

[paul0660]

Calguns mods could do a better job if stupid posts were reported.

Assuming reports cannot be a reason to be banned.

Question asked.

[Fate]

Not interested, OP. Your asking price is too high.

[postal]

From what I've read , feedback supports no new laws. You make this sound like we are collaborating with you to check off a box to say that this bill was developed with gun owner support/input. If so, that's disingenuous.

+10,000

Stop feeding the troll.

[dram]

From what I've read , feedback supports no new laws. You make this sound like we are collaborating with you to check off a box to say that this bill was developed with gun owner support/input. If so, that's disingenuous.

You're right, a lot of the feedback here does support no new laws. I'm getting different feedback elsewhere.

As I said in my initial post, I wanted to get feedback to refine my proposal and to better understand the arguments against my proposal. I've done both those things. I have no interest in claiming either publicly or privately that this proposal was developed with gun owner support or input other than my own. I would much prefer to say that I solved the entire gun problem all by myself to the satisfaction of the left while maintaining our fundamental right to bear arms without the help of anybody. (Not that I think I could do that or that this proposal does that.)

I understand the objections and views that people have raised in this thread. However, I believe that simply refusing to acknowledge that a large portion of the electorate see a problem with gun violence and refusing to offer constructive solutions to that perceived problem is not a winning strategy for securing our rights.

What we need to do is find constructive ways to make people feel safer and to reduce the perception that there is a gun problem, starting by reducing the number of gun deaths in this country. We can do this by getting more guns into the hands of law-abiding citizens, which this proposal tries to do, and by enacting some regulations that will make people feel safer about who has guns, whether that actually reduces gun violence or not.

We need to change the distribution of guns between law-abiding citizens and criminals, so there are fewer criminals with guns compared to law-abiding citizens than there are today. We need to do this by both increasing the number of law-abiding citizens with guns and reducing the number of criminals with guns.

We need to reduce the frequency and severity of media reports on gun violence. Gun violence doesn't touch most people, the only thing they know of it is what they see on the news. By getting gun violence out of the news it will become a non-issue to most people.

And probably most importantly, we need to reintroduce the idea into society that there are legitimate uses of force, even lethal force, that are derived from the individual and not the government.

This proposal seeks to do a bit of what we need to do to secure our right to bear arms for the long term, but clearly does not do everything. But it's a start.