In a recent conversation with Breitbart News, Gun Owners of California’s (GOC) Sam Paredes told us to be ready for an all-out ban on semi-automatic long guns in California’s coming legislative session.
Paredes is the executive director of GOC, and he suggested the “assault weapons” ban and the “bullet button” ban have both been part of an incremental move toward banning all semi-automatic rifles, whether “assault” style or not.
We discussed the surge in long gun sales, which are currently taking CA by storm. The surge is the result of residents trying to beat the “bullet button” ban, which takes effect January 1, 2017. You cannot buy an AR-15 with a “bullet button” after that date, but you are allowed to keep one with such a button if purchased before the new year. (For those who many not know, a “bullet button” is a mechanism that people in the other 49 states would refer to as a magazine release. With one caveat: the button only works when depressed with the sharp point of a tool or the tip of a bullet, thus the phrase “bullet button.”)
After discussing long gun sales, we asked Paredes if there was anything on the legislative horizon we should know about. He said, “These laws are the tip of the iceberg here in California. We expect they are going to introduce legislation to totally ban semi-automatic long guns in California. They will do this because they know we will come up with a new way to beat their latest ban–the ‘bullet button’ ban–if given time.”
Parades added, “They had a bill for this last year that we were able to kill. We think they will bring it up again and they will also introduce legislation to put in place a one-gun-per-month of any kind purchase limit. This limit will apply whether it’s a handgun or a long gun, in order to try to slow down the sales of guns in California.”
It must be noted that California has universal background checks. This means the only kind of firearms sales allowed in the state are those that incorporate a background check. Consequently, this also means that all the new bans, rules, and regulations being discussed by Parades are bans, rules, and regulations that will be applied to residents who buy their guns via a background check; and this is a roundabout way of saying the bans, rules, and regulations will only apply to law-abiding citizens because they are the ones who follow the rules. Criminals, on the other hand, will buy their guns from personal and/or street connections and will face no limit on the number of guns they can buy per month nor on whether those guns are semi-automatics.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.