California legislator targets 80% lowers, other "ghost" guns

If there is one thing that California’s anti-gun Democrats hate, it’s liberty.

Unable to get Governor Jerry Brown to sign on to a bill that passed both houses of the state legislature that would have outlawed virtually all semi-automatic rifles, they’re once again trying the incrementalist approach, this time targeting those guns made by citizens that can’t readily be tracked through the state’s draconian registration system.

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Unsurprisingly, liberty-hating state senator Kevin de Leon is leading the charge towards tyranny:

Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) announced that he would introduce legislation to ban the sale, manufacture, purchase and trafficking of so-called ghost guns, including plastic firearms and other homemade guns that are not otherwise registered.

De Leon is concerned about the invention of 3-D printers that can make guns out of materials that do not show up on metal detectors.

“The threat of plastic and self-assembled firearms should not be underestimated,” De Leon said. “There is an emerging industry and market for untraceable and undetectable ghost guns.”

3D printed plastic guns are a red herring; what de Leon is really targeting is the home assembly of conventional firearms, such as AR-15 rifles built from 80% receivers, and AK-pattern rifles similar to the one a bed-wetting Mother Jones reporter made at a build party near Los Angeles earlier this year.

The manufacture of firearms for your own personal use is legal under federal law and is currently legal under state law in California, as long as that firearm complies with all applicable federal laws (you can’t build an end-user-manufactured unregistered machine gun, or in CA, a semi-automatic without a “bullet button”). De Leon is attempting make that illegal, so that Californians can’t have any firearms that the state doesn’t have on their registry.

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One has to wonder why de Leon and his anti-gun peers in the California legislature consider home-manufactured firearms such a threat. There are relatively few of them made, and they are rarely used in crime.

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