Would California bill would restrict all firearm parts?

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File

We all know how the state of California feels about firearms. They’re not big fans of the right to keep and bear arms and they make no bones about it. Year after year, they pass more and more restrictive measures.

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In fact, it’s to the point that it’s hard to imagine just how much worse they can make it without trying some kind of total gun ban.

Yet based on a news report, it looked like one California lawmaker there figured out a way.

A local lawmaker wants to crackdown on “ghost guns,” untraceable, unregistered firearms that can be assembled at home and sold on the streets.

“Your children are not supposed to go before you,” Arvis Jones, with the gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, said on Friday in Leimert Park.

Jones, who lost her son to gun violence, was speaking out in support of newly proposed state legislation that would ban ghost guns.

“I can’t tell you what the pain is like, and all these mothers behind me, some wearing our shirts, can tell you how horrible it is to experience the loss of a child.”

Assemblyman Mike Gibson, who represents South Los Angeles, introduced AB 1621 to regulate the gun kits. If the bill passes, the sale of individual parts used to make the ghost guns would be banned.

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Now, that last paragraph may be a bit confusing for some. Does the bill ban kits or does it ban the individual parts.

Especially since it doesn’t seem that either would be good for gun owners, right?

Well, I took a look at the text of the bill and I’m not really sure what Gibson is crowing about. The only parts that look like they’ll be impacted are defined as, “any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled or converted to be used as the frame or receiver of a functional firearm, or that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as the frame or receiver of a functional firearm once completed, assembled or converted.”

In other words, that just impacts incomplete receivers, not any of the other parts. It also doesn’t look like it adds a whole lot to California law except making people get the serial number before they assemble the firearm, rather than afterward like they do now.

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This wording also won’t impact things like shovels that can be turned into AK-pattern receivers nor will it do anything about the blocks of metal you’d use with one of the Ghost Gunners.

It also won’t do anything to inhibit criminals from using 3D printers.

Of course, I wouldn’t worry too much about any of them. While we have tons of vague pronouncements about the dangers of so-called ghost guns in California, but little in the way of hard numbers that can actually be verified. Much of the handwringing seems to have been the result of nonsense.

Besides, criminals were able to get guns easily enough before “ghost guns” were a thing and they’ll continue to get them without an issue. Nothing will change in that regard and this law is unlikely to change a thing.

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