Pre-Thanksgiving Present For California Gun Owners

When politicians want to announce news or launch a new policy and they don't want it to get a lot of attention they release it without fanfare on either a Friday afternoon or the afternoon before the beginning of a long holiday weekend. Such is the case with the California Department of Justice and their newly announced "assault weapons" regulations. The 52 pages of the new regulations can be found here.

The Firearms Policy Coalition challenged their rulemaking in the past and won based upon how they sought to implement them without public comment. According to their release below, I think it is reasonable to expect more challenges to these regulations and the implementation of them by the California Department of Justice.

From FPC:

California DOJ Pushes New “Assault Weapons” Regulations Before Thanksgiving Holiday

SACRAMENTO, CA (November 22, 2017) — Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) has issued the following statement regarding the latest California Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed regulations on so-called “assault weapons”:

Once again, the California DOJ and Attorney General Xavier Becerra have used 11^th-hour tactics to push its anti-gun agenda, this time by releasing new proposed “assault weapons” regulations right before a major holiday.

FPC has published the new proposed regulations at BulletButtonBan.com — a Web site it established in 2016 for tracking the new California assault weapon laws and regulations — where members of the public can use FPC’s grassroots action tools to submit written comments to DOJ regarding the proposed regulations. A public hearing on the new regulations is scheduled for 10 a.m. on January 8, 2018, at the Resources Building Auditorium in Sacramento.

Last December, the California DOJ submitted its first attempt at “assault weapons” regulations under the Office of Administrative Law (OAL) “File & Print” process, which means that the DOJ believed the regulations were not subject to public notice or comment. However, thousands of FPC members and Second Amendment supporters sent letters opposing the secret process through FPC’s grassroots tools and, without further comment, the DOJ withdrew the regulations near the end of OAL review period.

Then, in May, the DOJ re-submitted regulations under the same “File & Print” process. Those regulations were summarily rejected by OAL a little more than a month later. Following that, the DOJ submitted a virtually-identical set of regulations under the “File & Print” process, which OAL approved in July.

Now, the Department is attempting to promulgate a new regulation to apply the July regulations to all aspects of the State’s “assault weapons” laws, including for purposes of criminal prosecutions.

FPC’s attorneys are hard at work reviewing the regulations and have been instructed to take every appropriate legal action to defend California gun owners and individual liberties.

Earlier this year, FPC was forced to sue the DOJ over the Department’s actions to block access to public records and a previous version of the regulations.