Jerry Brown: We’re Coming for Your High-Capacity Magazines

On July 1, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring residents to surrender or otherwise dispose of all high-capacity gun magazines.

The high-capacity gun magazine ban goes into effect July 1, 2017, and the language of the ban – contained in SB 1446 – leaves no question as to the limited options for owners of such magazines:

Brown, a fourth-term Democrat, also signed a bill creating ammunition background checks in the state, which means law-abiding citizens will have to go through a background check for ammunition in the same way they go through a check for firearm purchases.

And, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Brown also signed a “ban [on] the sale of semiautomatic rifles equipped with bullet buttons” and a prohibition against loaning guns to family members – unless said family members also pass a background check.

Regarding the ammunition background checks, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence told the New York Times that the hope is they will serve as a backdoor tool for finding guns that aren’t on the books — something gun control advocates have been trying to do on the national level for decades. The Brady Campaign’s Amanda Wilcox said, “It can give us a handle on who has illegal guns in the state.”

However, there is a difference between “illegal guns” and non-registered guns, which may include legal guns (and legal gun owners) that are not in the state government’s database.

It is important to point out that the high-capacity magazine ban basically limits Californians to using the same size magazines Elliot Rodger used in his 2014 mass shooting in Santa Barbara.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.