'No real objection'

Citizen disarmament advocates in California are pleased with the results of California's gun registry/seizure program.

A heavy afternoon rain blurs the sky as three black sport utility vehicles pull up across from a one-story stucco house on Pinole Valley Road.

The man inside just turned 60 and recently was placed under a psychiatric hold as a suicide risk, says one of the five state agents. Records show he owns 15 guns, including two assault weapons. Under state law, he must give them up for five years. He hasn't.

"This guy could have a pure disdain for police," Special Agent Supervisor John Marsh says. "It's almost like the boy with the CrackerJack box. When we get to the door, we never know what surprise is going to be inside."

So . . . an anti-defense mental health caregiver decides you're a "suicide risk," and three truckloads of armed agents of the state come to take your property. Yeah--that should be good for the mental health.

Such seizures from "armed and prohibited" gun owners are growing more common across the state, officials say, after the launch last year of a new state computer system that links gun ownership records with a database of people who are banned from keeping them.

The results of an early sampling were remarkable: Nearly 70,000 people statewide, and more than 15,000 in the Bay Area, either kept their guns in violation of state law, or records of their sale or transfer were never entered properly.

Citizen disarmament advocates love this sort of program, and like to imply that anyone opposed to it must be supporters of domestic abusers. It's a pretty effective gambit, because few people are more despicable than men who beat and terrorize their wives/girlfriends. The problem is that one can be found to be a domestic abuser without a criminal conviction, and with nothing like the kind of standard of evidence necessary for such a conviction.

Next, we hear from everyone's favorite hero of medicine, Dr. Gary Wintemute.

"When you're talking about people who've just been served with a restraining order or committed crimes, a person's risk of committing crime number two is highest shortly thereafter," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. "These are precisely the kind of people we want to not have guns."

Wintemute has helped the agents prioritize which types of barred gun owners they should seek first, since the numbers grow too fast to keep up with. State figures show that nearly 800 new people per month are added to the state system. Felony convictions are the top reason, followed by domestic violence restraining orders.

The system, created from 2002 legislation, now holds nearly 11,000 names, although the actual number of armed and prohibited people is several times greater, officials say.

Sending multiple SUV's loaded with government stormtroopers to all those homes is going to generate a lot of greenhouse gases, isn't it? What's a Governator to do?

The part of the article that perhaps disturbed me the most, however, came at the end.

Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, said he hopes the technology puts an end to a nettlesome problem. Too often, he said, people unaware that past convictions barred them from owning guns would buy one and not be stopped, then face state enforcement. Paredes said the group has "no real objection" to the system.

"The law has to be obeyed," he said. "If you don't like the law, you work to change it."

Gun Owners of California is, of course, an affiliate of Gun Owners of America--supposedly the "no compromise" wing of the gun rights movement. Here I thought GOA argued for abolishing the entire NICS background check (and by extension, the entire failed concept of a "prohibited persons" list), and now an affiliate has "no real objection" to not only a rather expansive such list, but its incorporation with a confiscation program. (War on Guns has more).

Speaking of War on Guns (and David Codrea) and California gun registries, David has convinced me to stop using the term "law-abiding gun owner." As far as I can tell, "bootlicker" is not only more concise, but more accurate and descriptive, as well.