After the Stockton massacre, the term "assault weapons" became the pejorative term to classify any long arm that gun prohibitionists desired to ban. The weapon used by Patrick Purdy was a semi-automatic rifle, not the Soviet fully automatic military firearm, which is not for sale legally in the United States. Yet, his semi-automatic firearm became the gun-banners’ symbol for "assault weapons."
In response to the furor over Patrick Purdy and his firearm, the California legislature defined and banned the "assault weapon." In 1989, it passed the Roberti-Roos bill, which listed roughly 70 firearms, generally identified by make and model and required owners of these guns to register them with the state. Additionally the legislature further defined "assault weapons" to include guns with specific characteristics such as pistol grips, magazine capacity, and other cosmetic features. The law was so draconian that even after gun-owners registered their rifles, the guns could not be sold or bequeathed.
By the 1991 cut-off date, only 34,000 firearms were registered, from an estimated 250,000 to 1 million firearms, and manufacturers renamed their firearms to avoid those named guns.
The gun banners responded to the renamed firearms and in 1991 amended the "assault weapons" law declaring that AR-15 and AK-47 "series" guns (defined as other models, regardless of manufacturer, "that are only variations, with minor differences") were "assault weapons" too.
Those amendments led to more unwitting "assault weapon" violators. People like Desert Hot Springs Police Officer Steven O'Connor was arrested and prosecuted by his own department just last year for possessing a Maadi RML rifle, incorrectly deemed an AK "series" gun. It isn't. It took ten months for the case to be dismissed; but he still isn’t back on the job.
Due to poor registration compliance, the legislature also included money for an "education campaign" and extended the grace period for registration until March 1992. If a gun owner was caught with an unregistered gun after that date and prosecuted, it was possible for him to register the offending firearm, thereby reducing the felony to an infraction, and get his gun back. Former Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren, not wishing to further alienate gun owners, as he was planning to run for Governor in 1998, extended the registration date, causing Handgun Control, Inc.(HCI) to file suit.
When Democrat Bill Lockyear, an avowed gun prohibitionist, became Attorney General in 1999, he dropped opposition to HCI’s lawsuit, thereby invalidating every post-1992 registration and causing all those legally-owned firearms to become illegal.
This wasn’t happening in some Third World country, but in our most populous state: California. Honest, law-abiding citizens complying with a gun registration law were told to either turn them into the police, render them inoperable, or get them out of state. It was California’s version of firearms confiscation -- gun registration leading to ipso-facto gun confiscation. emphasis added In late June, the California Supreme Court recognized some of the 1991 law's flaws and partially limited the laws’ application in Harrott v. County of Kings. The Court simply stated that the DOJ must give folks notice of specifically what guns are 1991 AK or AR "series" guns.
The decision, however, in no way affects the original 1989 list and the 1999 amendments. Since the legislature passed the 1999 amendments and the new Attorney General unilaterally declared 140 guns to be AR and AK "series" firearms, this decision is too little, too late.
It’s easy to see why California gun owners believe their government is out to get them. They have borne the brunt of arbitrary and capricious definitions, and have watched gun owners arrested for mere possession of legally acquired firearms. Thus there grows among American gun owners, as with Americans during Prohibition, a vanishing respect for both the law-making process and the legal system
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=23707 And also in other states:
New Jersey in 1990 banned ownership of so-called assault rifles. Governor Jim Florio declaimed: "There are some weapons that are just so dangerous that society has a right and the obligation even to take those weapons out of circulation." President Clinton considers the New Jersey law a model for the nation, declaring last October: "We need a national law to do what New Jersey has done here with assault weapons." But the ban was so extensive that even some models of BB guns were outlawed. Owners of the restricted guns were required to surrender them to the police, sell them to a licensed dealer, or render the guns inoperable. Yet, Ira Marlowe of the Coalition for New Jersey Sportsmen reported that "there was not one murder . . . with a semiautomatic assault weapon" in New Jersey in 1989, the year before the ban took effect. Joseph Constance, deputy chief of the Trenton, New Jersey, Police Department, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 1993:
"Since police started keeping statistics, we now know that assault weapons are/were used in an underwhelming .026 of 1 percent of crimes in New Jersey. This means that my officers are more likely to confront an escaped tiger from the local zoo than to confront an assault rifle in the hands of a drug-crazed killer on the streets."
New Jersey had an estimated 300,000 owners of "assault weapons," each potentially facing up to five years in prison for violating the state law.
New York City required rifle owners to register their guns in 1967; city council members at that time promised that the registration lists would not be used for a general confiscation of law-abiding citizens' weapons. Roughly one million New Yorkers were obliged to register with police. The New York Times editorialized on September 26, 1967:
"No sportsman should object to a city law that makes it mandatory to obtain a license from the Police Department and to register rifles. . . . Carefully drawn local legislation would protect the constitutional rights of owners and buyers. The purpose of registration would be not to prohibit but to control dangerous weapons."
In 1991, New York City Mayor David Dinkins railroaded a bill through the city council banning possession of many semiautomatic rifles, claiming that they were actually assault weapons.
Scores of thousands of residents who had registered in 1967 and scrupulously obeyed the law were stripped of their right to own their guns. Police are now using the registration lists to crack down on gun owners; police have sent out threatening letters, and policemen have gone door-to-door demanding that people surrender their guns, according to Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer and author of two books on gun control. emphasis added ***snip***
Halbrook notes that the New York ban "prohibits so many guns that they don't even know how many are prohibited" and that the law is so vague that the city police "arbitrarily apply it to almost any gun owner." Jerold Levine, counsel to the New York Rifle Association, observed: "Tens of thousands of New York veterans who kept their rifles from World War II or the Korean War have been turned into felons as a result of this law. Even the puny target-shooting guns in Coney Island arcades have been banned under the new law because their magazines hold more than five rounds." The motto of New York gun owners fighting the proposal was: "We Complied, They Lied." Jerry Preiser, president of the Federation of New York State Rifle and Pistol Clubs, declared that the mayor's and city council's acts "only show that New York City's leaders are like repeat sex offenders . . . they can never be trusted!"
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0396d.asp So yes, firearms have been confiscated. A bigger problem is that some states restrict certain firearms. This is effectively taking away the ability to own firearms that citizens in other states enjoy.
California restricts the sale of many firearms. For example, I have recently considered buying a NAA Mini-Master .22 mag revolver with a 4" barrel. If I decide, I can just walk up the street to the hardware store where it sits in the gun display counter.
Only two NAA revolvers are listed on the approved California list. Both have a barrel length of 1.25" Not what I wanted.
The longer barrel length and the better sights would make it possible for me to easily shoot with greater accuracy at longer ranges.
This is the only NAA .22 mag I can buy in California.
Now I ask you, does that make any sense at all? The California approved firearm is easier to conceal and lacks the barrel length and the sights for any target shooting.
To view the list of firearms approved for sale in California visit:
http://certguns.doj.ca.gov/ edited for fat fingers