I have long held the firm belief that the majority of cops strongly support the second amendment. This belief was not only based on personal experiences with cops I have come into contact with during my career at my own agency here in gun hating California but from other neighboring agencies as well. That opinion is also based on the results of national surveys that have been done over the years, with the largest having been completed by Police One several years ago.
I am not alone in this belief. Cops I have run into from around the country express the same beliefs, including the people here at 2A Cops. But there is always an exception to the rule. Most times the exception is an individual, but in this case it is an entire agency – the California Department of Justice (DOJ)*.
(* please see Editor’s Note at the end of this piece)
It should come as no surprise to anyone that an agency that has long been headed by virulent anti-gun Attorney Generals (politicians) such as Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra would be happy as a clam to enforce gun control laws. The problem is that most people not in law enforcement cannot distinguish the difference between the DOJ goon squad and real cops. And I am here to tell you, the sworn personnel that work for the California DOJ are NOT real cops. They may have taken the same oath as the rest of us, but they sure did not mean it.
More than a year ago, I heard about a case the California DOJ had filed on a law abiding California resident, whose only crime was attempting to comply with the new “assault weapon” registration law. He had a AR-15 which he legally purchased and the rifle was equipped with a muzzle device that was marketed as a compensator. However, the DOJ saw it differently, and rather than discussing their concerns with the man who was attempting to comply with the law, instead they seized his rifle.
They kept the rifle for an extended period of time during which they claimed they were going to perform tests on it (but never did). They claimed that because the compensator mounted on the rifle had a similar appearance to a flash hider, that it was indeed a flash hider. That decision rendered the rifle an “illegal assault weapon,” a felony for which they attempted to prosecute the man.
Here is the kicker. The muzzle device on his rifle was not some super specialized, aftermarket, high performance combat brake. It was a factory generic compensator of the type that came on thousands of other rifles just like it, from the factory, that were legally sold right here in California.
Coincidentally enough, not only was that man a law abiding citizen, he was a federally licensed firearms dealer and a former cop. Yet here is the California DOJ trying to make him into a felon.
That decision about that one factory component, made by a bunch of gun hating bureaucrats at the California DOJ, single-handedly attempted to turn thousands of law abiding Californians into felons.
If you own any guns, a right that is guaranteed you by the US Constitution, that should scare the crap out you.
The fact that they filed a criminal case on a guy who was merely trying to comply with the law is why I will never think of the California DOJ as real cops.
Their decision to arrest that man would be like me, back when I was working as a patrol cop, arresting someone who called us to try and turn in a bag of illegal drugs they found. The law states possession of the drugs is a crime, and that person is in possession of the drugs, therefore I should arrest them… At least that appears to be the thought process of these DOJ goons when dealing with law abiding people who are merely attempting to comply with the nearly indecipherable California gun laws.
In another incident, a YouTube gun channel operator recorded his own interaction with the California DOJ when they showed up at his house and confiscated some guns he had tried to register in an attempt to comply with the registration law. That video was then shared by another YouTube channel, GunGuyTV.
Just a few days ago, a friend who also happens to be another California cop (a real one), sent me a message. He took a couple of screen grabs of a warning that was posted in a group he belongs to. The warning was that the CA DOJ was actively following California residents leaving a Cabella’s store located near Reno, NV back into California and stopping them, and asking to search their cars based on nothing more than the fact that they had been inside the store. In fact, the person who purportedly initiated the warning was a retired (real) cop who left the store with nothing in his hands.
For those who might doubt the veracity of a randomly posted warning on Facebook, this is not remotely new behavior on the part of the California DOJ. The following video actually discusses it in more depth.
The incidents I pointed out above are not remotely statistical outliers either.
Having been a cop for just over a decade, I have spent nearly that entire time defending my profession from false allegations on social media. People often point to one or two legit instances of police brutality, or one where a cop simply made a mistake, and try to use those incidents to paint the entire profession as bad. The problem is, those incidents account for less than 1/100th of a percent of the contacts made by law enforcement, and thus they prove nothing other than cops are human just like everyone else.
The problem with the California DOJ is that they only have 400 sworn personnel (I will not call them cops) and the number of arrests they have made, and weapons they have wrongfully confiscated due to people’s attempts to comply with California’s ridiculous obstacle course of gun control laws, makes incidents like the ones above statistically significant.
And let us be clear here, this was not just some new guy working there trying to get a reputation as a go-getter. The decisions to go forward with these cases went way up the chain of command, and are being followed throughout that chain. This is a systemic problem within that agency, not some random gung-ho employee.
Seriously, the fact that apparently no one in that chain of command at the California DOJ understands the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law is extremely troubling.
It saddens me knowing that from now on, when I happen to find myself defending my chosen profession of law enforcement I will need to include the following caveat – “except the California DOJ. Eff them!”
EDITOR’S NOTE: While the author of this piece directed it about the entire California DOJ, in fact there are numerous bureaus there who all specialize in different fields. This article should more accurately be directed at the DOJ’s Bureau of Firearms instead of the entire agency.
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