2016 will usher in a fresh wave of assaults on Second Amendment rights

From Hot Air:

Matt covered the ongoing mess in Virginia earlier this morning, where the reciprocity issue for gun permit owners is being essentially tossed on the trash heap, but I’m sorry to say that their story is only the tip of the iceberg. Having lost the battle of public opinion on the importance of Second Amendment rights and losing repeatedly in the courts at the federal level, gun rights opponents have been crafting new strategies to chip away the constitutional rights of gun owners at the state level. (This is traditionally the line of attack where they’ve enjoyed the most success.) Since the Democrats want to score big points with the gun grabbers in their base and there’s a big election on the horizon, you can count on these stories making the news all year long.

One of the first – and more interesting – assaults is taking place in California this week to ring in the new year. Promoted as an effort to curb gun violence committed by the mentally disturbed, family members of gun owners will be able to ask a judge to summarily suspend any citizen’s Second Amendment rights for a period three weeks if they feel that he might be a danger to others. (Washington Times)

Proposed in the wake of a deadly May 2014 shooting rampage by Elliot Rodger, the bill provides family members with a means of having an emergency “gun violence restraining order” imposed against a loved one if they can convince a judge that allowing that person to possess a firearm “poses an immediate and present danger of causing personal injury to himself, herself or another by having in his or her custody or control.”

“The law gives us a vehicle to cause the person to surrender their weapons, to have a time out, if you will,” Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Michael Moore told a local NPR affiliate. “It allows further examination of the person’s mental state.”

This is a fairly clever approach by the anti-gun lobby because it ties in to the one area where there is broad agreement between both sides of the gun control debate. Everyone is concerned over legitimately insane, dangerous persons having access to firearms, and that’s the lever being applied with this new legislation. The obvious problem with it is the same as we’ve seen with all other private reporting protocols. It’s true that you might wind up taking some weapons away (briefly) from a potentially dangerous, unstable person, but the net immediately becomes so wide that it’s open to rampant abuse.

I suspect every divorce case will have one of these GVRO hearings.