by Dan Cannon
Los Angeles is looking to become the third California city to institute its own gun control laws. The city is looking to institute a ban on owning standard capacity magazines.
Currently, California already has a magazine capacity limit in place, but the law addresses the sale and transfer of those magazines, not necessarily possession.
The new LA law would make it a misdemeanor to possess these magazines at all, regardless of data of manufacture or how they were acquired.
According to the LA Daily News,
The Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office revised a proposed ordinance to mirror large-capacity magazine bans in San Francisco and Sunnyvale that have withstood Second Amendment challenges in two Northern California District courts, Deputy City Attorney Brian Sottile said.The Sunnyvale case is being appealed.
The revised Los Angeles proposal would make possessing large-capacity magazines a misdemeanor one year after the ordinance’s adoption and give owners of the clips 60 days to surrender them, with several exceptions for law enforcement, museum collections and for magazines that hold 10 or less rounds of ammunition for firearms purchased before Jan. 1, 2000.Since the sale/transfer of these magazines is illegal in California, it would seem that there would be no legal way for residents of LA to even get rid of their magazines besides turning them in to the government. Maybe there is a legal way to transfer them out of state, but that’s not much better.