California Seizes Guns as Owners Lose Right to Keep Arms

[Roverron]

California Department of Justice police agents walk towards a house near Ontario, California on Tuesday, March 5, 2013. The agents, working for the only state-level program to confiscate illegal firearms from owners, targeted people who’d once legally purchased firearms and lost the right after being convicted of violent crimes, committed to mental institutions or hit with restraining orders.
Wearing bulletproof vests and carrying 40-caliber Glock pistols, nine California Justice Department agents assembled outside a ranch-style house in a suburb east of Los Angeles. They were looking for a gun owner who’d recently spent two days in a mental hospital.

Special Agent Supervisor John Marsh who coordinates the operations around California, said: “We’re not contacting anybody who can legally own a gun. The only people we’re contacting are people who are prohibited from owning guns.”

Lynette lips, 48, and her husband, David lips, 51, sit in their home in Upland, California on March 5, 2013. Lynette, a nurse, had to surrender three guns after spending two days in a mental hospital in December.

Weapons with ammunition seized from the home of Lynette and David lips by agents with the California Department of Justice police in Upland, California.

California Department of Justice police agents walk towards a house near Ontario, California on March 5, 2013. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

Special Agent Supervisor John Marsh with the California Department of Justice drives out to seize illegal firearms near Ontario, California on March 5, 2013.

They knocked on the door and asked to come in. About 45 minutes later, they came away peacefully with three firearms.

California is the only state that tracks and disarms people with legally registered guns who have lost the right to own them, according to Attorney General Kamala Harris. Almost 20,000 gun owners in the state are prohibited from possessing firearms, including convicted felons, those under a domestic violence restraining order or deemed mentally unstable.

“What do we do about the guns that are already in the hands of persons who, by law, are considered too dangerous to possess them?” Harris said in a letter to Vice President Joe Biden after a Connecticut school shooting in December left 26 dead. She recommended that Biden, heading a White House review of gun policy, consider California as a national model.

As many as 200,000 people nationwide may no longer be qualified to own firearms, according to Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Other states may lack confiscation programs because they don’t track purchases as closely as California, which requires most weapons sales go through a licensed dealer and be reported.
“Very, very few states have an archive of firearm owners like we have,” said Wintemute, who helped set up the program.

The no-gun list is compiled by cross-referencing files on almost 1 million handgun and assault-weapon owners with databases of new criminal records and involuntary mental-health commitments. About 15 to 20 names are added each day, according to the attorney general’s office.

Probable Cause
Merely being in a database of registered gun owners and having a “disqualifying event,” such as a felony conviction or restraining order, isn’t sufficient evidence for a search warrant, Marsh said March 5 during raids in San Bernardino County. So the agents often must talk their way into a residence to look for weapons, he said.

rest of story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...tml?cmpid=yhoo