You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

The Democrats’ assault on the First Amendment has been so brazen lately that it’s often easy to forget that they have been waging an even longer and more concerted battle against the Second Amendment.

In states where Democrats hold complete control, such as California, they can be counted on to do whatever they can to prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns — or at least to harass them to the point that it is as difficult as possible.

When they aren’t trying to ban the most popular rifles (even though they are almost never used in crimes), they are filing dubious lawsuits against gun manufacturers for consumers’ misuse of their products. When they aren’t devising cutesy ideas such as ammunition taxes, they are trying to pass rules under strange pretexts, such as environmental rules supposedly designed to protect animals from eating the lead in bullets, but are really just trying to make it impossible to use bullets.

Another such cute proposal has just been signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The measure, AB 173, will soon give researchers at the California Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California-Davis access to all the information that the state collects about gun and ammunition purchasers , including personally identifying information, although this is supposedly not to be “transferred, revealed, and used for purposes other than research.”

Although the media try to tell a different story, Democrats’ obsession with identifying and tracking gun owners has been the single biggest obstacle to reforms that would help keep guns out of the wrong hands at the federal level. The best such proposal , which would have dramatically reduced the number of transactions lacking background checks, was rejected by the Obama administration after the Sandy Hook massacre because it deliberately avoided creating databases that could be used to track gun owners.

More to the point, California’s state government already has the bad habit of using the information it keeps on gun owners to hound them in a way other states do not. In 2013, the state began a very expensive program of doubtful effectiveness to seize guns from purchasers who subsequently were rendered ineligible — for example, due to a criminal conviction or even just a nasty divorce.

Earlier this month, California Rifle and Pistol Association Legislative Director Roy Griffith wrote to Newsom , asking him to veto the bill. He correctly argued that gun owners deserve privacy just as much as all other consumers, who are protected in California from the dissemination of their personal information by Proposition 24, passed in 2020.

“The identities and confidential personal information of individuals should only be provided by … state entities to law enforcement agencies when conducting an investigation that has a specific need for it,” writes Griffith. “No other entity, not even research institutions, has sufficient justification to have access to an individual’s private information.

If government workers leak private IRS data despite felony penalties, California gun owners’ private data will be leaked too. It is not a question of if, but of when. This will not only violate gun owners’ privacy, but it will also give criminals a nice list from which to work when looking for guns to steal.

Even before that inevitably happens, there is simply no reason to send the personal information of gun owners to anti-gun academics. The federal courts must step in to preserve Second Amendment rights in the states.