by When politicians want to announce news or launch a new policy and they don’t want it to get a lot of attention they release it without fanfare on either a Friday afternoon or the afternoon before the beginning of a long holiday weekend. Such is the case with the California Department of Justice and their newly announced “assault weapons” regulations. The 52 pages of the new regulations can be found here.
The Firearms Policy Coalition challenged their rulemaking in the past and won based upon how they sought to implement them without public comment. According to their release below, I think it is reasonable to expect more challenges to these regulations and the implementation of them by the California Department of Justice.
From FPC:
SACRAMENTO,
CA (November 22, 2017) — Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) has issued the
following statement regarding the latest California Department of
Justice (DOJ) proposed regulations on so-called “assault weapons”:Once again, the California DOJ and Attorney General Xavier Becerra have used 11th-hour
tactics to push its anti-gun agenda, this time by releasing new
proposed “assault weapons” regulations right before a major holiday.FPC has published the new proposed regulations at BulletButtonBan.com —
a Web site it established in 2016 for tracking the new California
assault weapon laws and regulations — where members of the public can
use FPC’s grassroots action tools to submit written comments to DOJ
regarding the proposed regulations. A public hearing on the new
regulations is scheduled for 10 a.m. on January 8, 2018, at the
Resources Building Auditorium in Sacramento.Last
December, the California DOJ submitted its first attempt at “assault
weapons” regulations under the Office of Administrative Law (OAL) “File
& Print” process, which means that the DOJ believed the regulations
were not subject to public notice or comment. However, thousands of FPC
members and Second Amendment supporters sent letters opposing the secret
process through FPC’s grassroots tools and, without further comment,
the DOJ withdrew the regulations near the end of OAL review period.Then,
in May, the DOJ re-submitted regulations under the same “File &
Print” process. Those regulations were summarily rejected by OAL a
little more than a month later. Following that, the DOJ submitted a
virtually-identical set of regulations under the “File & Print”
process, which OAL approved in July.Now,
the Department is attempting to promulgate a new regulation to apply
the July regulations to all aspects of the State’s “assault weapons”
laws, including for purposes of criminal prosecutions.FPC’s
attorneys are hard at work reviewing the regulations and have been
instructed to take every appropriate legal action to defend California
gun owners and individual liberties.Earlier
this year, FPC was forced to sue the DOJ over the Department’s actions
to block access to public records and a previous version of the
regulations.