One recurring theme at this site is that California is a hostile state when it comes to the Second Amendment. They don’t like guns and they don’t like gun owners. The state lawmakers seem to view gun owners as a special breed of criminal they just can’t arrest.

Yet.

However, there are people in the state that actually have decent sense, especially when it comes to encroachment on our gun rights. Some of those people even get elected to office. In particular, we have the Fresno County sheriff.

California will add a new gun control law to the books next month. It gives more people access to a court process that could lead to the temporary removal of someone’s guns when they pose a danger to themselves or others.

Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims has concerns about the law. “My fear with those kinds of laws is the incrementalism that it can cause. How far is it gonna go next year? How far is it gonna go the following year.”

Assembly bill 61 adds teachers, employers and co-workers to the list who can file a gun violence restraining order. Under the state’s red flag gun law, only law enforcement and family members can do so.

The Fresno County District Attorney thinks this is great and cites all the help his office has given in helping people file these, which is part of the problem with red flag laws. Invariably, the mere use of them is taken as evidence of their effectiveness, but that’s not really true. It’ll become even less true of skittish coworkers or teachers can petition for someone to lose their gun rights, even temporarily.

Sheriff Mims is absolutely correct to be concerned because if anyone thinks this is where California draws the line, they’re wrong. There will be more coming down the road.

Oh, the may not tinker with it for the next year or two, focusing on something else, but then they’ll decide friends need to be included or something else equally stupid.

They will come back to this and expand it.

See, in logic, there’s an informal logical fallacy called the Slippery Slope Fallacy. Basically, it’s a fallacy to debate about a small step that can lead to all kinds of other things. It’s something to be careful about.

However, in California, we don’t have a small step. We have a series of small steps that have eventually made it so that gun ownership is California is the proverbial pain in the butt. It’s not a fallacy because we’ve seen it happen. Saying that the new measure may lead to more changes down the road isn’t fallacious when we’ve seen it happen over and over again.

Sheriff Mims has likely seen it herself, and she’s calling it out. Frankly, we’ve been calling this out for years now and absolutely no one in that neck of the woods seems interested in listening. It’s a shame, too, because we predicted this was going to happen.

Hopefully, they’ll listen to Sheriff Mims, at least, but I’m not counting on it.