OPINION: The state’s gun laws have hassled law-abiding hunters and gun hobbyists and some are in danger of being declared unconstitutional.
Nor have these laws prevented the lawless from obtaining weapons via theft,or the illicit manufacture of untraceable “ghost guns.” Indeed, state restrictions have made the black market even more lucrative, mirroring the side effects of Prohibition and the decades-long drug war.
So why, if California’s much-vaunted gun control laws have failed to choke off the supply of legal and illegal weapons, do politicians continue to claim that enacting even more will have an effect? In the aftermath of the shooting, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg lamented to a radio interviewer about California’s difficulty in reducing the number of guns, saying, “You just have to go to a gun show in Reno to buy an assault weapon without a background check and come right back to California.”, one must be a resident of Nevada and undergo a federal background check to legally buy a gun in Reno.