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In California there is a ten-day waiting period before you may possess your firearm after purchase. In Riverside County there is a longer than two year wait before you may obtain a concealed carry permit. A California CCW also requires a just cause statement, meaning that the applicant must give a good reason for obtaining the CCW, and wanting to protect oneself is not a good enough reason. California is full of gun-free zones, and some of the tightest gun control measures in the country. California has outlawed a number of types of guns, larger magazines, and anything that allows ease of access when it comes to removing one's magazine so that you may reload your gun. California is even placing more and more restrictions on the purchase of ammunition. You may only discharge a firearm in California, for the most part, at a firing range, while hunting, or while defending oneself while in imminent danger. If you wish to keep yourself safe, from a legal standoint, and you have to kill an attacker at your home, the body better be inside your house, and you have better not have shot the intruder in the back.
I've been visiting Brookings, Oregon this week, and it has been commented to me that it is legal to fire a gun pretty much anywhere inside Curry County. We have some targets on the meadow below the main deck here at the house, and we have spent some time shooting at them.
While at a market in town, where the choice regarding firearm purchase was more extensive than any gun shop in Southern California, I asked the man behind the counter how long it would take before I could take my gun home.
"It takes about 30 seconds to do the background check," he said. "Overall, it takes about five minutes, but that's only because that is about how long it takes to fill out the paperwork."
An Oregonian concealed carry permit takes about 45 days, and you don't have to explain why you need to carry a gun. Open carry permits are also available. There are virtually no "gun-free zones," save for places like Portland, and other hives where the liberal left population in Oregon gathers. I could hear gunshots in the distance pretty much all day while relaxing on the main deck of the house.
According to Wikipedia, the gun murders rate per 100,000 inhabitants in California is 3.3; in Oregon that number 0.8.
USA Today, in their article, "States with the most (and least) gun violence," places California in the ten worst section with (according to their statistics) 7.9 per 100,000 overall firearm deaths per 100,000 people; total firearm deaths in 2016 at 3,184; and the violent crime rate at 445.3 per 100,000 (15th worst). Oregon was much closer to the middle of the pack with 11.8 firearm deaths per 100,000; 513 total firearm deaths, and a violent crime rate of 264.6 per 100,000 (14th lowest in the country). While USA Today claims that the firearms deaths per 100,000 is close, but slightly better in California, the violent crime rate statistics reveals that a vast majority of the gun violence in California is the result of bad guys with guns, rather than hunting accidents or suicides.
Bad guys with guns exist because there are people who are evil in the world. Individuals make decisions. There are influences, of course. If someone was raised in a death cult where they have been taught all of their lives that anyone who disagrees with them must be either enslaved or killed, and to kill such a person is a guarantee to end up in paradise during the afterlife, the person may be more likely to use a firearm to kill. If someone is raised to believe that life is not worth living because in their generation the environment will be so bad that life will be miserable, despite the fact that there is no true, hard science backing up the claim, suicidal thoughts or violent lashing out may become a factor. If a person believes that anybody disagreeing with them is rude, and become so offended that they either curl up in the corner with emotional distress, or scream and yell at the person that it's offensive for the other person to dare say things that opposes their belief system, they might be prone to act violently, and perhaps even to the point of using a firearm on crowds of people, including schools, concerts full of people they believe are of the ilk that make them feel offended, or at political baseball game practices.
If a person is going to be dangerous with a firearm, no law is going to stop them. They are already willing to break the law with murderous intent, so why would some gun control law stop them? Also, if they are intent on injuring, or even killing, people, they will go where it is most likely they will face the least resistance, thus, providing for them the highest chance for survival. Gun-free zones, and/or places where good guys with guns are likely to be at a minimum, will be their obvious choice.
The right to keep and bear arms does not exist just so that we may go hunting, or protect ourselves from mass shooters or home invaders. While it is nice to have a firearm for those reasons, those reasons were not the deciding factors behind the Founding Fathers' decision regarding whether or not to write the Second Amendment.
In history, and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution realized this, dictators, authoritarians, malevolent kings, and any other kind of tyrannical leader, places first and foremost among their policies controlling the populace so as to secure their own power. Subjects who can fight back can be dangerous to a tyrannical regime, so they must be disarmed in order to be controlled. The list of powerful tyrants who believed in gun control is long, with names like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and pretty much every other communist leader in history on that list. The American Revolution began when King George III decided it was time to disarm the colonists. Concord, Massachusetts was a large armory where much of the colony's weapons and ammunition was stored. The Redcoats were intercepted at Lexington, on their way to take the guns of the American Colonists, and it was at that point the "shot heard 'round the world" was fired.
Think about it, for a moment. The British Empire had been unfairly taxing the colonists, had been imposing mercantilist restraints on the colonies, illegally searching the homes of the colonists, and had been requiring the colonists to quarter British troops against their wishes. But, in the end, it was the move by the British of threatening to take the guns of the Colonists that was finally the straw that broke the camel's back.
Not only is Oregon an overall safer place than California (especially when it comes to violent crime committed with firearms) because of the lack of ridiculous stringent gun regulations in the State (as compared to California), but if one really thinks about it, California's gun control laws rank right up there with the nastiest of history's worst tyrannical regimes.
It's not about guns. It's about power, control, and tyranny. We can either be armed citizens, or unarmed subjects. There is no in-between.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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