California Scheming

SUNNYVALE, Calif.: 2 cities struggle to enforce ban on gun magazines | State News | FresnoBee.com:
 (AP - March 08, 2014)

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Enforcement issues surround two Northern California cities' bans on high-capacity magazines.

The Oakland Tribune (http://tinyurl.com/lvtufr3 ) reported Saturday that since Sunnyvale's ban went into effect midnight Thursday, not one of the now-illegal magazines has been turned in. San Francisco police report that they have no system to track whether any magazines have been turned in for destruction under the new ordinance. San Francisco residents must surrender their high-capacity magazines to police by April 7.

The two California cities enacted laws similar to several other municipalities banning magazines that hold more 10 bullets in reaction to the 2012 mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The National Rifle Association has filed legal challenges to the bans in Sunnyvale, San Francisco and elsewhere. Judges have so far upheld the bans.

California law has banned the sale of high-capacity magazines since 2000, but it allows owners who possessed the items before 2000 to keep them. Sunnyvale, San Francisco and other cities have gone a step further and made possession of the high-capacity magazines a misdemeanor crime.

This is a story much like the recent news about Citizen Rebellion in Connecticut.  It isn't quite the "Tree of Liberty" and "Tyrants and Patriots" level of revolution; it's more like the Mahatma Ghandi "Peaceful non-compliance" approach.  In Connecticut, and now in California, we see that the only way to deal with unjust laws is to ignore them.

It is a quiet, peaceful rebellion.

Ghandi drove the British out of India by setting the example; the Brits were the Brutes there, and the Dems are the Damned in California, Colorado and Connecticut.  And probably elsewhere, also, until the people who would deny us our constitutional rights realize that we are simply going to ignore their efforts.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Personal observations:
In 1970, I couldn't find work after I got out of the army, so I used the GI bill to take a computer programming course.  I learned COBOL, RPG, and BASIC on an IBM360 (learned how to operate the mainframe computer, too!)

When I couldn't find work in Oregon as an entry-level programmer, I left my bride in Oregon and drove to California where I stayed with a college buddy while I looked for work in the Bay Area.

After about a month of making the rounds, I was hired by a Computer Service Bureau in Oakland ... as a delivery driver.  Every morning I got to work at 5am, printed off a bunch of reports, boxed them up, and delivered them to businesses who found it more cost effective to hire the service bureau to do their data processing for them.  I picked up their current day's paperwork, delivered the previous day's paperwork along with the generated reports.   I fought commuter traffic all day long, and ran the printers, rewired key-card sorters, and put in ten hour days for a year.   For this they payed me $410 a month.  (Which was a huge advance on the $102 a month I had earned as a starting salary in the Army!)

Finally I convinced them to let me advance to a job that I had been for, and working toward for over a year; programming!  Something the required more than a strong back and a driver's license!

I did actually use my COBOL and RPG expertise, and also learned another form-based programming language (similar to RPG) in the process.

After four years, I took my vacation in Oregon and while visiting there found a higher-paying job in Oregon, doing much the same thing (although I did have to learn a couple more programming languages).

Actually, I didn't expect that my new job would pay much more than my old job (although I still hadn't reached the lofty level of a "$10,000 - a - year - man" which was my goal).  I just wanted to get the HELL out of California.

There was no actual "climate" in the Bay area ... every day was just about the same; windy and foggy to one degree or another.  Except, of course for the Political Climate which I found increasingly grating on my increasingly Conservative sensibilities.

(Well, that and the crime level ... somebody bombed the neighborhood Safeway store with a Shaped Charge ... but they pointed the wrong end at the exterior brick wall so it didn't do much better.  And my next door neighbor was mugged by three teenage girls during her one-block walk from the bus stop to our apartment building ... in daylight.)

Now, when I read the news describing the escalating Liberal Imperialism in California, I'm increasingly thankful that I chose to move back to Oregon in 1976 .. well, the bicentennial seemed an appropriate time to declare my own independence from autocracy.

Oregon is still filled with Democrats, and the self-entitlement voting freeloaders in our few Metropolitan areas keep our otherwise Red State into something of a purple haze.

But at least the ranchers, farmers, small-town folks and most of the vets (and other people who actually WORK for a living) have the actual purse strings (read: income), and control a plurality of the counties and congressional districts, so we don't have to knuckle down to the full-drag Liberal agenda.

It is nice to live in a Free state.   I'm glad my son got out, although he says he still misses the sun.  Now I just have to figure how to get my daughter out.

It totally SUCKS to live in California!