Californians are Putting Their Money Down on a Sure Bet: Guns

From The BearingArms

Just two weeks short weeks after Governor Jerry Brown showed his hand by signing a number of gun control measures into law, Californians are putting their money down on a sure bet: AR-15 rifles.

“The California compliant rifles right now are non-existent. There is nothing out there,” said Ray Parga, owner of Del Valle Gunsmithing in Marina, CA.

Parga told local reporters that sales of AR-15 style firearms are through the roof. Not only are the guns he had in stock completely sold out, but replenishment orders were sold before they’ll ever touch store shelves.

“We’re getting right now, probably 20 calls a day and we are a small shop,” said Parga. “Generally they just want to be able to have one before they aren’t allowed to buy them anymore.”

The Law of unintended consequences.

California -- A Case Study in the Failure of Gun Control

From Breitbart California:

In 1989, California became “the first state to ban assault weapons.” Since that time, it has enacted a steady stream of gun controls, only to see violent crime rise and high-profile shootings — including terror attacks — betray the lie that gun control saves lives.

Just days ago, Governor Jerry Brown signed new gun controls into law. Those controls include a requirement that ammunition purchasers go through a background check just like firearms purchasers and “impose new restrictions on assault weapons,” according to the New York Times.

It is crucial to note that the “new restrictions on assault weapons” are the result of the old restrictions being circumvented. Although this circumvention was lawful in some cases — via the use of bullet buttons to remove magazines — the fact that it happened so easily only bolsters arguments from the NRA, Gun Owners of America, Breitbart News, and others who stress that gun control does not prevent criminals from getting the guns they need.
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So crime must be dropping, right? On the contrary, violent crime is up.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, murder in California rose ten percent last year. Additionally, in San Francisco — a city with some of the most stringent gun controls in the state — “smash-and-grab car burglaries … were up 31 percent in 2015 and have nearly tripled since 2010.”
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Jerry Brown’s solution to these gun control failures? More gun control.

Progressive have the same solution for all the world's problems, more government spending and/or control.

Thought of the Day

From Instapundit:

California will now require an ID and a background check for ammunition purchases, but ..................

(Wait for it!)

...... Not to vote.

(H/T: Cary Cheshire)

California's high speed rail delayed another 4 years

From Rick Moran at The American Thinker Blog:

The incredible journey of California's high speed rail took another hit this past week when authorities inked a contract revision pushing back the opening of the first segment of the line from 2018 to 2022.

Project costs for this one, 119 mile stretch of track through the relatively empty Central Valley have topped $69 billion, with only a fraction of those funds appropriated. The high speed rail authority has only purchased half the land necessary to complete the first leg of the project and not a single foot of track has been laid.

The feds are blaming opponents of the project, citing lawsuits and other nuisances. But in fact, the project began with no vision about how it would be funded or built.

Choo choo to no where....

California -- The Ultimate Nanny State

From The Federalist:

In California, a 15-year-old girl can abort a viable baby without telling her parents, but starting now a married 20-year-old with a job and kids can’t buy a pack of cigarettes. Or get a drink. That same 15-year-old girl is banned from getting an indoor tan, and a woman must obtain, and give, “affirmative consent” before kissing someone during her college years.

No one can use foam takeout containers or plastic carryout bags or play online poker. This is a state that wanted to ban you from eating the livers of waterfowl. If the state discovers you’ve purchased raw milk, a confiscation team may visit your home to impound the supply. The sale of caffeinated beer is forbidden. E-cigarettes are now treated as if they were tobacco, even if they are not.

In San Francisco, where it’s illegal to light your own fireplace during Christmas, if you fail to recycle your trash correctly you can be fined up to $500, but you can’t get a toy with your Happy Meal because they’re banned. In Los Angeles, you have to wear a condom to make a porno, but you can have unprotected sex in Caligula-style orgies as long as you don’t film it.

Yes, we live in a messed up State.

The New WASPs

From National Review:

The commitment to philanthropy here is in fact remarkable. It isn’t just billionaires giving away a few millions they won’t miss — although, let’s not sneer at those mere millions, either — but an entire civic culture built around the assumption that successful people will invest both money and time in doing good on a large scale. That philanthropy is shaped by the tech industry’s expectations of high return on investment, and the business of measuring philanthropic effectiveness has taken off as a field of enterprise in itself. Of course there are carping critics, the antediluvian types at the New York Times who insist that these billionaire captains of industry should be fighting for the politically managed redistribution of wealth rather than working to make private philanthropy more effective — and that completely misses the point. There are not in fact very many self-professed libertarians out here, but the reflexive belief that government should be, or is going to be, the primary actor running the show when it comes to building a better world simply isn’t an operating assumption among the famous founders and venture capitalists who shape the culture of Silicon Valley.

The dichotomy is stunning.

California Clean Air Board Ignoring Deadly Truck Fires

From Legal Insurrection:

California’s owner/operators of trucks, small business owners, and farmers and ranchers, whose livelihood is tied to having affordable, safe, and reliable trucks for transporting goods, were targeted by the California Air Resources Board, and required to install Diesel Particulate Filters in all commercial trucks.

“When CARB made this regulation, it kicked thousands of independent truckers out of this business,” Caldwell said. “If I had started my business today under CARB regulations, I couldn’t do it.”

And now their trucks are exploding thanks to the California Air Resources Board’s ‘Truck and Bus Regulations’ to control emissions from diesel engines.

The Diesel Particulate Filter devices were hailed by CARB, in countless public statements and Executive Orders, as an inexpensive, easy to install, device that could be implemented on all diesel powered engines throughout the State of California within just a few years. The CARB claimed the use of the filters would thereby improve air quality in the Los Angeles and San Joaquin basins.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

It took some time, but CARB has finally publicly acknowledged that the Diesel Particulate Filter is expensive to install and maintain, mechanically unreliable, and the warranties are inadequate both as to time, mileage and scope of coverage.

But even worse, the Diesel Particulate Filter clogs, causing engine fires. These engine fires erupt, and have caused numerous very serious and even deadly accidents, as well as devastating property damage.

Useless technoligy that has been proven faulty. But how could such a faulty device be allowed to be forcefully installed on diesel truck?

Bucking the highly fashionable notion that California’s air pollution is deadly, Dr. James Enstrom was one of only a few scientists willing to blow the whistle on the fraudulent science perpetrated at the California Air Resources Board.

Enstrom challenged the scientific research that the California Air Resources Board and California Legislature used to enact policies regulating diesel fuel emissions. And then he was fired from his job of 35 years at University of California, Los Angeles.

Enstrom exposed the cover-up of “junk environmental science.” He also outed the phony scientist Hien Tran at the California Air Resources Board, as well as the Legislature’s subsequent adoption of regulations stemming from the fake science.

Consequently, the university gave Enstrom his walking papers rather than admit they were wrong, and risk losing the gravy train of ongoing public grants and funding.

Corruption at CARB, what a surprise.

CA Democrats Worry They Won't Regain A Supermajority

From Breitbart California:

Walters points out that the Democratic supermajority had trouble implementing their leftist agenda because of moderate Democrats who balked at the plan. He adds that other races, including former Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra’s effort to win a rematch with Assemblywoman Patty Lopez and outgoing Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins’ battle with Sen. Marty Block in San Diego, may throw a wrench into the Democrats’ plans.

And this is a problem how?

2,986 Shooting Victims in Gun-Controlled Chicago During 2015

From Breitbart's Big Government: Too short to except:

On January 1, the Chicago Tribune reported that the number of shooting victims in gun-controlled Chicago for 2015 was 2,986.

Mind you, Chicago has a “violence tax” that raises the price of every gun and bullet sold at retail, an “assault weapons” ban, limits on the number of gun stores and the locations of those stores, and what the New York Times describes as handgun restrictions that let city leaders “get as close as they could get legally to a ban without a ban.”

The result? According to the Chicago Tribune, there has been nearly 3,000 shooting victims in one year’s time.

And the Tribune reports approximate 470 homicides for Chicago in 2015, which means gun-controlled Chicago had “the most violent year of all major U.S. cities.” It is the worst year the city has seen since 2012, “when 500 people were killed.”

On October 27, President Obama tried to blame Indiana and Wisconsin for the gun control failure in Chicago. His line of reasoning was that the pro-Second Amendment stance of Indiana and Wisconsin led to guns flooding into Chicago from out of state. Bretibart News previously reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) made a similar move on September 17, when he blamed southern states for New York City’s soaring rate of firearm-related homicides.

The Dear Leader blaming Wisconsin and Indiana for the gun control fail makes about as much sense as Kalifornia Gov. Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown blaming Nevada and Arizona's gun control laws for the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino. All the gun used in the San Bernardino shooting were legally purchased in Kalifornia, after a universal background check and a 10 day waiting period.

California, Leading from Behind

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

California has given us three new truths about government.

One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse state services become.

Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc.

And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it.

California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state senate. In response, the state legislature naturally wants to raise gas taxes, with one proposal calling for an increase of 12 cents per gallon, which would give California the highest gas taxes in the nation.

Because oil prices have crashed, state bureaucrats apparently believe that the public won’t notice the tax increase in their fill-up costs – even though special California fuel mandates already help make gas prices 25 percent higher than the national average.

Consider California’s upside-down logic. The state wanted to discourage driving and promote hybrid vehicles by upping taxes on carbon fuels. It worked, though it cost the public dearly. People drove less and bought more fuel-efficient cars. But now, because less gas is burned, fewer taxes are collected. So the state wants to reward motorists for their green sacrifices by raising their taxes even higher to make up for missing revenue. If state motorists drive even less and cram into two-seat commuter cars, will California further reward them with even higher gas taxes?
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If California motorists are driving far fewer miles, shouldn’t roads wear out more slowly – and additional taxes not need to be raised for repairs? Could state revenues that have been diverted to the high-speed rail boondoggle instead be used for road repairs?

The State is run by a bunch of nincompoops. Why, because they are elected by a large group of nincompoops. That is why this stat is doomed.

California Gun Law Will Let Police Confiscate Legally-Owned Weapons

From The Daily Caller:

A new California law scheduled to take effect Friday will allow the police to seize private, legally-owned weapons for up to three weeks without charges or allowing the citizen to contest the seizure.
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Under the law, a judge has the power to grant a restraining order telling police to seize a person’s guns, based solely on accounts from family members or police that the person is poses an imminent danger to others. The restraining order can be granted without the affected person knowing it exists or being allowed time to contest it.

This law does seem to violate, what 3 constitutional amendments.

Gas Prices Stay High in California, Fall in Rest of Country

From Breitbart California:

The average price of gas is below $2 per gallon in more than half of the United States, but prices at California pumps are creeping higher due to maintenance issues at refineries across the Golden State.

As of Monday evening, the average price of gas in California sat at $2.85 a gallon, well above the less than $2 per gallon national average, according to gas price-tracking service GasBuddy. The high statewide average is buoyed by particularly pricy pumps in Los Angeles ($3.04/gallon), San Diego ($2.99/gallon), and San Bernardino ($2.97/gallon).

California already enjoys higher-than-average gas prices due to the botched implementation of global warming legislation signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly a decade ago. But recent disruptions at several major refineries across the state have compounded the problem, and motorists are feeling the difference at the pumps.

Yet another reason to move out of this state, when I retire.

What Price Will Californians Pay for Decent Roads?

From PJ Media:

California Assembly Republicans say the Brown plan is worse than being a dark version of what has already failed. The GOP is united in the belief that Brown’s plan would toss billions of dollars at a problem that hundreds of billions of dollars haven’t been able to fix.

Republicans said their constituents were already paying the price of a state transportation bureaucracy that has botched the job of keeping roads and highways in good shape. Now, Brown wants to keep throwing good money after bad, they maintain.

“What are they doing with the taxes Californians have been paying at the pumps?” Sen. Jim Nielsen, the vice-chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said.

GOP leaders also said the state’s roads could be pothole-free without bureaucrats putting their fingers on taxpayers’ wallets. Assembly Republicans will be pushing a nine-point, $6.6 billion plan in January that would fix the roads “with existing resources." In other words, no tax increases.

Assembly Republican Leader Kristin Olsen said in September that she was glad the Brown administration had finally come to the realization that it was time to “streamline road repairs, utilize public-private partnerships, and get sparking about hiring at CalTrans to eliminate waste.”

“Unfortunately, the administration’s ideas call for more than doubling the vehicle registration fees and raising the price of fuel on all Californians – we disagree and think Californians have paid enough,” Olsen said. "Funds exist to fix our roads. It’s up to the majority party to recognize this.”

The Legislature wants to and has been siphoning money away from the road repair fund and transferred it toward public transportation for years. I don't believe that practice will end. It's all about doling out money to their favorite group. Unfortunately, it will lead to the worst case scenario:

The legislature does nothing and “these roads will disintegrate to the point where they’ll have to be rebuilt, which is very, very expensive,” said Sen. Jim Beall (D).

That I agree.

Pelosi -- California Gun Laws Didn't Stop Terrorists, So 'That's Why We Need a National Gun Law'

From PJ Media via H/t at Instapundit:

Failing upward!

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that even with her home state's strict gun laws the San Bernardino terrorists got their weapons, but argued that's reason to expand the statutes federally nonetheless.

Pelosi was asked on PBS about the fact that the guns used in last week's massacre at a county Christmas party were legally purchased in California, which "has one of the tougher gun control laws in the country."

"Well, it is. And the fact is that's why we need a national gun law so that there is no thought that even though one state may have good laws you can buy guns in another place. These, as you said, were bought in California," Pelosi said.

Quoting one the brighter philosophers of our day, Inigo Montoya, who happens to be a superior intellect that Granny Legosi, "You keep using [those] word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

On Guns, Californians Practice ‘Irish Democracy’ and Ignore Bone-Headed Laws

From National Review:

It isn’t even St. Patrick’s Day, but we are all Irish now: In Connecticut, the boneheaded state government passed a law demanding the registration of certain firearms, and the people of Connecticut, perhaps communing for a moment with their independent-minded Yankee forebears, mainly refused to comply. On the other side of the country in the heart of California’s technology corridor, the city of Sunnyvale demanded that residents hand over all firearms capable of accepting magazines holding more than ten rounds — effectively, everything except revolvers and some single-shot rifles — and the good men and women of Silicon Valley responded by turning in a grand total of zero firearms. Similar initiatives in other jurisdictions have produced similar results.

Political scientists call this “Irish democracy,” the phenomenon by which the general members of a polity resist the mandates of their would-be rulers by simply refusing to comply with them. It is a low-cost form of civil disobedience, but one that can be very effective at times: Mohandas K. Gandhi was entirely correct in his famous declaration to the British powers that they would eventually be forced to simply pack up their tiffin pails and go home, because 300,000 Englishman could not control 300 million (at the time) Indians if those Indians didn’t cooperate.
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The hallmark episode of Irish democracy in the American setting is Prohibition, which is a cautionary tale — and not only for the would-be modern prohibitionist. Prohibition demonstrated several things to the American public, which took the lesson to heart: Politicians are entirely capable of making stupid laws when in the grips of voguish thinking; the American people are more than capable of ignoring and subverting those laws; that subversion often is met with ruthlessness and brutality on the part of law enforcement, but enforcement is by no means even-handed; hypocrisy, like alcohol, is a useful social lubricant in moderation but debilitating in excess; social tensions reveal who has political power and who doesn’t, casting a harsh bright light on Lenin’s fundamental question — “Who? Whom?”; and law enforcement is just as corruptible as any other institution. Prohibition did a lot of damage by providing an enduring model of organized crime, but it also undermined Americans’ faith in the rule of law as such: Favoritism in enforcement, bribery, and institutional incapacity severely damaged the law’s prestige. We have never really quite recovered.

Our new prohibitionists are a lot like the old ones. The nice corduroy-clad liberals in places such as Georgetown and the Upper West Side use guns as a stand-in for the sort of people who own guns in much the same way as the old WASP prohibitionists used booze as a stand-in for the sort of people who drank too much: Irish and other Catholics, especially immigrants, and especially especially poor immigrants. The horror at “gun culture” is about the culture — rural, conservative, traditionalist, patriotic, self-reliant or at least aspiring to self-reliance — much more than it is about the guns. It’s the same sort of dynamic that gets people worked up about Confederate flags or poor white people with diabetes who shop at Walmart.

A little dose of Irish democracy is an excellent thing in response to that, especially when it is coming from California and Connecticut rather than Oklahoma and Alabama. But winning the fight on gun rights while losing the fight on the rule of law is the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

That's the main problem with 'Irish Democracy'.

California’s War on the Working Class

From Victor Davis Hanson at Breitbart's Big Government:

Host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon asked Hanson about the decline of California and how the political elites have sold out the state, while they immunized themselves from the devastation.

“They love high-speed rail but they just don’t want to build it,” Hanson said of California’s elite. “They love open borders, but they put their kids in prep schools so they’re not impacted by non-English speakers. They love letting all of our precious irrigation water go out to the ocean, taking it away from farmers, but they don’t dare touch the Hetch Hetchy water that comes to the Bay Area.”

Hanson further elaborated on the change that has taken place in California, especially in the Democratic Party—which is completely dominant in the population centers of coastal Bay Area and Los Angeles.

“The Democratic Party is no longer the party of Harry Truman and the working class. Once they had equality of opportunity enshrined; they went for equality of result and that caused them problems,” Hanson said.

California -- Warning Labels Coming to Bacon?

From Breitbart California:

California is grappling with a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) that claims that consuming red meat and processed meat could increase the risk of cancer–and the state could soon require warning labels on popular food items like sausages and bacon as a result.

According to Reuters, California health officials are debating whether to add processed meat to the cancer-alert list, which could require meat distributors to put warning labels on packages in grocery stores.

Under California’s Proposition 65, approved in 1986, the state is required to keep a list of all products and chemicals known to increase the risks of cancer. Some Prop 65 experts told Reuters that processed meats could be added to the list after the WHO’s bombshell report.

Only in Kalifornia!

Can California Be Saved?

From Victor Davis Hansen of National Review:

Why is California choosing the path of Detroit — growing government that it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return, and obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises?

The cause is political. California is a one-party state, without any serious audit of authorities in power.
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But what turned a once bipartisan and purple state bright blue?
A perfect storm of events.
Higher taxes and increased regulations have driven out lots of small-business owners. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled middle-of-the-road voters voted with their feet and left for no-tax Nevada, Texas, or Florida.
The state devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor — the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.
A third of America’s welfare recipients reside in California. Nearly a quarter of Californians live below the poverty line.
Yet nowhere in America are there more billionaires. California’s long, thin coastal corridor has become a tony La-La land unto itself. Some of the highest housing prices in the nation and richest communities are clustered along the Pacific coastline, from the wine country and Silicon Valley to Malibu and Hollywood, dotted by marquee coastal universities and zillionaire tech corporations.
Meanwhile, poorer people in the interior, in places such as Madera and Delano — far from Stanford, Google, Pacific Heights, and Santa Monica — require ever more public services. The very rich don’t mind paying the necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.

The Detroit analogy is apt — Zev Chafets of the New York Times wrote his harrowing book Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit in 1990, nearly a quarter century before Detroit declared bankruptcy, and his descriptions match the Obama-era reports describing Detroit’s collapse. Conservatives including Ann Coulter, George Will, and Heather Mac Donald have been sounding the alarm on California’s decline for at least the last 15 years. Comparing their earlier warnings with California’s dire current state as described by VDH illustrates how thoroughly the state has declined in the years since.

That's why I plan to move away when I retire.

If you tax it too much, they will go

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit at USA Today:

IRS data show that taxpayers are migrating from high-tax states like New York, Illinois, and California to low-tax states like Texas and Florida. And it’s not just sports stars or star scientists, doing that, but fairly ordinary people — though, of course, people who earn enough money to pay taxes. If you’re living on welfare benefits and don't plan to change that, you won’t move to a low-tax state to escape taxes; if you move anywhere, it’ll probably be to a state that offers better benefits than the one you live in now.

This phenomenon has numerous implications, but let’s talk about two: In time, if taxpayers tend to migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states, and if people receiving government benefits tend to stay in place or migrate from lower-benefit states to higher-benefit states, then over time lower-tax states will tend to accumulate more people with high earnings, while higher-benefit states will tend to accumulate more people who live on the dole.

Which is why I plan to move out of Kalifornia when I retire.

Everything Wrong With California in One Photo

From Steven Hayward at National Review:

Nationwide gasoline prices are below $3 a gallon. But here in California it is not unusual to see prices still over $4 a gallon. So what do liberal here want to do? Pass a law that mandates reducing gasoline consumption by 50 percent by the year 2030—just 15 years from now.
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Sponsors of the bill could not say how a 50% reduction in gasoline consumption would be accomplished. Higher prices? Rationing? Mandates that we all drive Teslas and Priuses? Even an economic illiterate could figure out that at the very least it would mean higher gasoline prices for people who cannot afford Teslas.

So Gov. Jerry Brown killed this part of the bill. But in typical Obama fashion, he says he will pursue the same goal with administrative regulations through the Air Resources Board.

The Primary Sponsor of the Bill was State Senator Kevin De'Leon, who represents some of the poorest people in the State. But he was encouraged by the likes of Tom Steyer, a multi-billioniare Green Warrior, who ironically got rich via coal.