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February 12, 2022

Own a gun in California? Prepare to give up your privacy if you have a kid

By Monica Showalter

Having found schools and COVID a useful vehicle for instituting Big Brother privacy violations, the leftists in charge in Sacramento have decided to go themselves one better by using schools and gun control as their next measure for controlling every aspect of people's lives.

SB-906, introduced by state Sen. Anthony Portanino of La Canada-Flintridge, north of Los Angeles, requires all parents who have children in public schools to disclose their gun ownership, the location of their guns, whether their guns are stored safely, and whether their kids have access to those firearms.  Whom this information would go to and how it would be used or, more likely, misused were not in the bill.

Worse still, it would require "any school official" including the teacher, the bureaucrat, the school board member, the counselor, the security guard, the gardener, the teacher's aide, the ex-con supposedly teaching the kids to stay out of jail on contract — anyone in the employ of the school district — to report to "law enforcement and the Department of Justice" any alert, threat, or "perceived threat" as they see it of a mass casualty incident, which would require the school district, working with law enforcement, to inspect student property on school and check those firearm disclosure records.  It appears that law enforcement would be allowed to enter those homes to "inspect" firearms without a warrant. 

Any perceived threat.

This, given that there are penalties for not reporting "immediately" even these perceived threats as the school's art teacher sees them, should flood the tip lines as school employees seek to cover their rears on anything they can imagine to be a threat.  Art teachers, after all, have great judgment, do they not?  And that's just part of the panoply of freaks that can be found in public schools these days.  School boards have lately declared parents protesting their COVID lockdown policies "terrorists."  There ought to be a lot of "perceived threats" with this requirement. 

And in any case, it's redundant.  Schools are required already to report credible threats, and they do, while parents are legally required to store firearms safely.  That's in California's law, noted here on its attorney general's page:

You may be guilty of a misdemeanor or a felony if you keep a loaded firearm within any premises that are under your custody or control and a child under 18 years of age obtains and uses it, resulting in injury or death, or carries it to a public place, unless you stored the firearm in a locked container or locked the firearm with a locking device to temporarily keep it from functioning.

it's also unenforceable.  What are they going to do about people who don't report, or who report falsely?  Will there be Big Brother mechanisms set up for enforcing that?  Or will this turn into some data chaos that penalizes the honest and allows others to do nothing?  Will illegals with kids in public schools comply with this reporting requirement?  They make up an abnormally large percentage of California's public schools.  Don't bet on it.

While we are on the topic of the public school's number-one interest, identity politics, one issue that doesn't come up with this proposed law is what happens when the "perceived threat" is black.  Will those cases be reported equally, or will the wokesters and law enforcement they snitch to suddenly perceive no threat because "racism"?  We already know they're letting spray shooters who are black off on bail, instead of locking them up, so expect the uneven application of this law based on the priority race considerations of the wokesters, too. 

Meanwhile, the law doesn't actually do anything to stop an imminent threat; it just requires reporting of information to others, and if there is no threat found, well, the information is still out there — to be sold and data-mined as some tech baron who profits from some state contract sees fit.  Too bad about that.  As for acting on imminent threats, that isn't addressed, either.  Does the FBI investigate all of these reports?  Actually, their record is pretty poor on it.  Just ask the Parkland parents.

Worse still, the law should incentivize some "school officials" to report on students whose politics they don't like, or who have knowledge that these kids' parents have guns.  Sound like a recipe for careful reporting?  No penalties, of course, for those who "over-report" or who report made-up "threats."  And don't think that's far-fetched.  Here's a sample of what you see in public education, mostly from LibsOfTikTok.  Think these guys would be just the people to act responsibly with this new requirement to report "perceived" threats?

Moral turpitude, politicized indoctrinators, hurlers of insults, makers of wild threats, and crazed lunatics are among the kinds of teachers populating the public school system these days.  These are the people who are expected to be in charge of all this new information about parents and their gun status, information that can also be sold to cartels for robbery purposes, handed over to known enemies of the parents, delivered to activists to use against the parents, and generally used to harass, with zero penalty for violations of privacy.  Who ends up with this information is anyone's guess because nobody gets punished for violations.

The law is probably well-intentioned.  School shootings, after all, are serious, and when they happen, people are always looking for the one solution that could have stopped them.  The areas that aren't explored in this law, but which are highly relevant to whether someone gets alienated enough to be a school shooter, are the character of the home, one- or two-parent status of the family, religious instruction, teaching, and knowledge of right from wrong (impossible to assess in the era of total relativism of values among the wokesters), dark web and violent game exposure, and ability to make friends, all of which make more difference in whether a student picks up a gun and decides to be a school shooter to impress all his crummy little dark web "friends."  Improving those things might make a difference, but it's not something schools can or are willing to solve by themselves.

The law was put out by a moderate Democrat who represents a light-blue or light-red suburban, non-impoverished, mostly white part of Los Angeles County and its adjacent areas.  Anthony Portanino is a former Hollywood executive who obsesses a lot about "sensible gun control measures."

But it remains a bad idea, as it blames guns for the crime surge instead of intent, and it opens the door to Big Brother privacy invasions as well as the real aim here which is gun confiscation.

And it won't work. After all, any school-shooting-minded loser who wants to kill can steal a gun, stamp out a ghost gun from a 3D printer, use a knife, get a can of gasoline and a match or use a car to achieve the murder and attention that he wants. The 9/11 hijackers used box cutters, not guns. There will be certain parents who don't comply and if they are Black or Hispanic, well, racism, the law will be applied unevenly. Worst of all, it doesn't stop intent, and therefore, it won't stop the crime itself, it will just serve as data mining to be used for political purposes as if there isn't enough of that being done questionably and illicitly altogether.

The only press that I can find that is covering this bad idea is from LAist, which notes that the bill is in its early stages but has passed through a "reading" in the statehouse:

The bill's introduction and first reading mark the earliest step in the state's legislative process. SB-906 would also provide parents with information on how to safely store firearms.

That suggests that either the press isn't doing its job, or the leftists in Sacramento are planning to sneak this measure "for our own good" through on the sly, skirting public debate.  It should drive more parents from the public school system and out of state who know what a problem it's going to be.  What it won't do is stop more school shootings.

Hat tip: Dale Lowdermilk.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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