The Problem With California Gun Control Is That It’s Communicable

All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)
I’ve been for a walk (I’ve been for a walk)
On a winter’s day (on a winter’s day)
I’d be safe and warm (I’d be safe and warm)
If I was in LA (if I was in LA)
California dreamin’ (California dreamin’)
On such a winter’s day
– The Mamas & the Papas

What does it mean to be safe in Los Angles? In 1965, when The Mamas & the Papas released “California Dreamin’,” LAwas a very different place. Today, what supposedly makes one safe in there is determined by a cadre of predominantly far left ideologues who control the state legislature. Their latest attempt to make the streets of Los Angeles—and the rest of the Golden State—safe comes in the form of a law that outlaws a particular gun.

The prohibition on GLOCK pistols is based on the state’s reclassification of the semi-automatic handgun as a machine gun. That’s a MACHINE GUN, for those not reading closely enough.

Are G pistols machine guns—or, more accurately, machine pistols—aside from the G18? No. The GLOCK 17, 19, 43, 43X, 34, and so on aren’t machine anything. They are semi-automatic firearms. You pull the trigger once and it goes bang once. And it doesn’t go bang again until you pull the trigger once more. That’s how semi-autos work.

However, thanks to an illegally manufactured and illegally sold, aftermarket device called a GLOCK switch, also known as an auto sear (though it’s not the design used in the G18), California’s Democrat dominated state leadership has banned GLOCK pistols solely on the basis that they could be altered—again, illegally.

This has nothing to do with GLOCK the manufacturer. Yet because somebody somewhere somehow made a device to alter the function of the company’s federally licensed and highly regulated legal products, the California legislature, in its infinite wisdom, along with the help of the Governor, has banned GLOCKs beginning July 1.

There are two problems that result from this maneuver, assuming it withstands the legal challenges being mounted by the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition.

The California Copycats

The first problem is the most obvious. Blue state legislatures will follow California’s lead and push through their own bad laws designed not to protect the public but to reduce the number of guns available to law-abiding citizens.

They will simply cut and paste the California legislation, add a line or two to give it that home-town flavor and, voilà, the GLOCK ban comes to a state near you.

In his New York Post opinion piece, California’s Glock ban sets stage for nationwide gun control, John Mac Ghlionn noted California’s unofficial but widely accepted role as “the ultimate legislative laboratory for aggressive gun control.”

Thanks to its size and political importance—both in terms of votes and fundraising—and its market share, which at one time was 11% of all firearms sold in the U.S., what happens in California rarely stays there. California’s vehicle emissions standards are perhaps the best-known example of the Californication of the rest of the country.

Gun control has always been about eliminating the number and types of guns available to people to purchase, where and how those guns can be used, and lately how those guns must be stored in homes. All of this is intended to force gun owners to conform to a government’s increasingly restrictive view of how the Second Amendment should be exercised.

The result, as Mac Ghlionn points out, is, “It leaves the Second Amendment looking more like a limited-time retail promotion than an unalienable right.”

California’s ban is about addition by subtraction, increasing gun control by eliminating one of the largest handgun product lines in America.

Setting a New Standard

Second, and more concerningly, it also gives governments a new standard by which products can be banned, companies brought to heel, and citizens controlled.

If a legally made and sold GLOCK pistol is banned because of what alterations might happen, then it opens the floodgates to attack any product based solely on a possible negative outcome completely out of the hands of the manufacturer—not unlike suing gun makers for the criminal misuse of their product by others.

This kind of legislation will be used to force companies to alter a product’s design, which only works until someone else develops another workaround. Or, it will be used to pressure manufacturers into financial settlements. Money that will go into a state-controlled fund and allegedly be doled out to address the very issue that arises from either bad actors or idiots.

The infamous Tide Pod Challenge comes to mind. In California’s way of thinking, Tide should have known kids on TikTok would start eating laundry detergetent and therefore needed to answer for egregious misuse of its product.

Considering California’s track record in how it uses taxpayer dollars to “solve” problems such as homelessness and high-speed rail, one can assume that any fund that’s created will best be described as a slush fund.

The irony here is that if California is punishing GLOCK for something that’s entirely out of its control. Shouldn’t California legislators and bureaucrats face similar punishment for funneling money to NGOs and cronies whose purpose appears less focused on solving homelessness or building high-speed rail than on lining their pockets?