Cafeoutdoors.com: The Gropenator has taken up the chronic. Lead ban in Kali-fornya

The gropenator finally sheds his sheepskin. I warned folks not to vote for his sorry liberal arse.

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GUN OWNERS, HUNTERS SLAPPED BY BILLS -- jim matthews column -- 17oct07

Governor signs pistol microstamping and lead ammunition ban legislation

By JIM MATTHEWS Outdoor News Service

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed two pieces of legislation on Saturday that were direct slaps in the face to gun owners, hunters, and common sense. His supposed ties to the conservative community suggested Arnold would veto both of them. He didn't. The governor is looking more and more like Gray Davis every day, instead of Ronald Reagan.

The normally very mild-mannered Lawrence Keane, the senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) said:

"Governor Schwarzenegger has now effectively banned more firearms than Senators [Ted] Kennedy, [Dianne] Feinstein and [Charles] Schumer combined. The governor has proven to gun owners and sportsmen that he is just another liberal, anti-gun Hollywood actor -- he just plays a moderate Republican on TV. Mr. Schwarzenegger has now exposed himself for what he really is, the most anti-gun and anti-sportsmen governor in America."

Whoa! What do you really think Larry? But he has reason to be hot.

AB1471: Beginning in 2010, AB1471 mandates all semiautomatic handguns sold in California must be able to imprint tiny markings onto the fired brass shell casing that will identify the gun from which they were fired. The idea is that casing found at crime scenes can be traced back to the owner who did the dirty deed. Never mind that over 90 percent of crimes committed with firearms are done with stolen firearms. Or that you or I can ruin a handguns' microstamping ability with an emery board from the wife's purse. Or that a marginally bright crook could collect shell casings from a shooting range and dump a handful out the window when he does his next driveby. That will send the police barking up wrong trees everywhere. Older guns without microstamping aren't banned, but I bet the attorney general's office will make it illegal to sell, trade, or even give them to family in your will. And I don't even want to think about what it will cost to manage this nightmare.

So I'll cover all bets that any crime solved after 2010 that uses a microstamped shell casing as evidence will still be solved if the microstamped case wasn't part of the evidence.

This is moronic legislation if you buy in to the stated purpose of the bill. It has nothing to do with solving crimes. It was never about solving crimes. What this legislation WILL do is dramatically reduce the volume and variety of semiautomatic handguns available for sale here, increase the cost of those that are sold, and effectively move toward eliminating a whole class of firearms in the state -- which is arguably exactly what the legislature wanted, even if it didn't have the courage to say this directly.

The bill will ban guns on a larger scale than any piece of legislation ever passed in this country. And it has done it in the most oblique way possible. It did it without saying it was a gun ban.

I have $100 that says the legislature will now try to pass similar legislation with "microstamping requirements for semi-automatic rifles, home defense shotguns (pump or semi-auto), and eventually all firearms. "The spent cases are like bread crumbs that lead right to the crooks," they will say over and over -- without a shred of evidence this is true.

Backtracking on this trail of politicians' words is like following bread crumbs to a pack of rats.

AB 821: The second bill the governor signed was AB 821, legislation that will ban the use of lead ammunition for hunting of big game and coyotes within the range of California condors.

Even the California Fish and Game Commission, the regulatory body that should handle such matters, wrote the governor to ask him to quash this bill. The Commission is -- or was (this is all kind of up-in-the-air and perhaps a moot point now) -- considering its own regulatory ban on lead big game and varmint ammunition ostensibly to protect condors. So why did they ask Arnold to veto the bill? Because the way the bill is written, it could effectively ban ALL ammunition and completely end big game hunting in condor range.

All it would take is an anti-hunting, whack job as attorney general, and, oh wait, we have former governor Moonbeam in that chair.
You see, there are trace amounts of lead in all of the solid copper bullets being touted as lead-free alternatives. All it would take is someone like Jerry Brown to say, "Nope, those Barnes X-bullets have itty, bitty amounts of lead. Banned lead."

We didn't help ourselves on this one. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and NSSF have been saying all along that lead was not a threat to condors. This is the quote you will read in press releases from both groups: "There is no conclusive scientific evidence that the birds are getting sick from ingesting ammunition fragments."

I can show you an X-ray of a dead condor with a perfectly mushroomed rifle bullet in its digestive tract. The necropsy proved the bird died from lead poisoning. It didn't die from lead picked up while breathing smoggy air, drinking tainted water, or eating paint chips off a wall in an old abandoned army depot. The lead slug killed it just as effectively as if it had been shot through the bird's skull.

What we should be saying is that there's only circumstantial and highly speculative evidence that condors are getting elevated lead levels, and occasional toxic levels, from hunter lead. We know there are occasional, rare incidents where condors have picked up lethal levels of lead from hunter's bullets. However, there's no proof the background lead in condor's blood is only from bullet lead.

Correlation is not causation, and any scientist who makes that leap doesn't deserve the title. The evidence is compelling that lead is problem, but certainly not conclusive. I've read nearly all the published scientific papers, and some of the authors should be ashamed of the leaps, the conclusions, they've made from the limited data.

Now, there's apparently even some evidence coming to light that some of these people have selectively used data to make their points. That is shameful. In Arizona, it even looks like field "data" was introduced to make hunter lead seem like a bigger culprit than it might be in reality. That is criminal.

Yet, for the NRA and NSSF to say "there's no conclusive evidence" is as grievous a mistake. This kind of rhetoric doesn't help our image as the nation's leading conservationists. In fact, it makes us look stupid, raving even. We all know lead is a toxin and that it has killed condors, including some lead from hunters' ammunition. We can admit that and still point out that a ban is absolutely the wrong direction to go.

The passage of both of these bills is frustrating for the average California gun owner and hunter. We deserve better from our elected officials.

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~spectr17

I need to get a good sun tan and a sombrero so I can do whatever the hell I want.

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