(September 1, 2002) People who discounted the Gun Safety Act of 2000 as little more than bureaucratic inconvenience are in for a shock. The most fundamental provision won't take effect until January, and what's coming is a doozy.

Until now gun owners have patiently worked through the law's other provisions. We all know that feel-good restrictions of previous years were only designed to make lawful gun owners jump through more hoops, and jump we did. If people view the Gun Safety Act as more of the same, then no surprise. The Glendening/Kennedy parting gift is another story.

Training mandate. Before we get into the new provisions, remember how many others in the Act are just so much nonsense. Take the "safety training" mandate. Ordinary citizens can't buy a regulated firearm - a handgun or some long guns - unless we've taken a state-regulated class. This continues to represent a hurdle to purchasers, but most folks don't care that the state worked against providing a class once its 'poll tax' was in place. Preparation on the current state class only began after we sued the state to make officials obey their own law. Later the MLFDA (Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association) smoothed implementation of this gun control by getting its own videotape class approved. This reduces the barrier to just 15 minutes of red tape - if you buy from an MLFDA member shop, that is.

[It's a cute deal. Dealers who work closely with MSP can complete buyers' paperwork on the spot. Dealers who call this gun control measure what it is must send their customers elsewhere for training. When the training mandate was enacted we had high hopes it would become the grassroots recruiting bonanza of all time, but police have done a good job of engineering around that prospect. So give them the credit they are due: there is no higher political coup than getting subjects to whip themselves.]

Students in the state classes never actually see a gun's firing depicted, so obviously the training mandate's purpose has nothing to do with safety. It is only about erecting barriers to lawful purchases of firearms.

Ballistic registration. What about the ballistic registration program? That was another prominent piece of the Gun Safety Act. No new handgun can be sold until the manufacturer gives to police a shell case fired out of that gun as evidence for the crime lab databases. This law is based on the assumption that handgun buyers use our purchases to commit crime, so police want a head start in preparing the forensic case against us.

This program's record is worse than that of training. Several million tax dollars have been spent on a measure that Kathleen Kennedy testified was an immediate crime fighting priority, yet two years of its use have solved no crimes. (Police now say it might not get its first match for years, and other states have both considered and abandoned ballistic registration as unworkable and scientifically unsound.)

Politicians can throw tax money around like confetti. Wasteful spending isn't a concern for gun owners … err … right? Well, there is that little matter of product availability. The overwhelming majority of handguns listed on the Roster are no longer sold since they do not meet Maryland's unique standards. The state says this is okay, since you can still get some handguns, even if not always ones you want.

So gun owners have meekly resigned themselves to this part of the law too, just as with all the other pieces of the package that have already taken effect. Notable among the latter is the provision that makes Ceasefire a line item in the state's budget. This lets a governor directly funnel cash to anti-gun projects. (Watch latest headlines of how feds are investigating Kathleen Kennedy's handling of funds on other of her projects. Then you can make a good guess on where Ceasefire money is really going!) But this brings us to what's in store for us starting January.

Integrated mechanical safety devices. What takes effect on January 1 is a ban on sale of any new handgun lacking an "integrated mechanical safety device." What does that mean? The law's language is plain on this point: "An integrated mechanical safety device means a disabling or locking device that is built into a handgun, and is designed to prevent the handgun from being discharged unless the device has been deactivated." So says the law.

Leave aside whether the state has need or justification to regulate such matters. Gun owners know almost all handguns are now built with devices consistent with this plain language. A thumb safety, grip safety or transfer bar are examples of what meet this standard. For this reason, many gun owners - including dealers - have largely ignored the new provision, believing handgun trade will be unaffected. But anyone who believes this makes the grave mistake of thinking about gun control like it is supposed to make sense.

From the very first, this law's proponents insisted on treating it as an ambiguous characterization, which will allow officials to decide later what was meant. They want bureaucrats to decide what can be sold. They stated this on the record: What handgun design meets this definition? "That which is not widely available today" was the response, both on the Senate floor and in Assistant AG opinions at the time.

What about handguns that let you lock the hammer with a key? Again, the administration is delighted that people assume these will be okay, when the record shows antigunners both intend and plan otherwise.

The state has given no guidance on how they intend to apply this law. In fact, because of how they drafted it, they have no obligation to tell us ahead of time. Normally such legislation would require appropriate agencies to "promulgate regulations" in advance of the enactment, but in this case citizens have already heard the last required word on what the police will do starting January 1.

If the administration's intent really is to mandate locks "which [are] not widely available today," then one might think they would let the industry know enough in advance for such guns to be designed and approved. But as with training requirements, we are on a path that will have restrictions imposed before there is a way to satisfy those restrictions. Presumably after guns are no longer available, police will tell the industry what it should have started designing a few years ago in order to sustain business in Maryland.

The effective date of this law is only weeks after the election. The openly spoken timing consideration was that no impact should be felt until it is too late for irate voters to respond accordingly.

Current status. In order to maintain the illusion that their lock definition lets them do what they want, administrators must slam their own law and declare it to be ambiguous. That's the only legal way they can bring "legislative intent" into play, a step that opens the floodgates to all the anti-gun rhetoric on this bill. (Normally an enacted law is taken at face value, and legislators are assumed to say what they meant. Legislators are supposed to enact plain laws. "Intent" arguments in court only arise when someone can successfully argue that language is not plain.)

Because of this, Maryland State Police have already started the legal ballet maneuvers needed to drive through what they want. Last spring, MSP Superintendent David Mitchell sent an official request to Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, asking how to interpret the new law. Curran's response in this choreographed exchange became public shortly ago. His opinion - unusual for its length, but not surprising because of the political game he plays - gives the unsurprising conclusion that state police will largely be able to do what they want.

Bottom line: An Attorney General who long ago declared war on private ownership of firearms just gave the green light to his minions. They may restrict handgun sales to only "that which is not widely available today." To date, no handgun manufacturer has been given guidance on what will shortly bring handgun sales to a screeching halt.

Meanwhile, most gun owners remain oblivious to what is in store for us in the new year.

Remember - at one-gun-a-month (imposed from the 1996 Glendening/Kennedy gun control package) there are as many new handguns left for you to buy as there are months left in the year. At this publication date, that comes to about four.

Shop wisely. It could be your lifetime supply.

'Ferguson lock' postscript. As if we don't have enough reasons to boot Tim Ferguson from his Senate seat, Ferguson's handiwork turns out to play a key role in the upcoming 'gun lock' debacle.

We already know the damage Ferguson did to our rights was dear. His refusal to filibuster the Gun Safety Act of 2000 cost us the ability to carve out provisions like the coming lock mandate. At the time, while working hand in glove with the administration to streamline the gun bill's passage, he got one amendment on the bill that nobody at the time could understand: He added two members to the Handgun Roster Board (one a mechanical and the other an electrical engineer.) Echoing the exact arguments used by proponents of the 1988 gun ban, he declared that these additions would help the state prohibit 'faulty guns' from sale here, a "good compromise" for passing the bill.

Most observers took Ferguson's endorsement of the handgun ban to be simple stupidity, a minor thing compared with his treachery on the filibuster. Now it appears there was method behind the madness: One crucial step in Curran's lengthy opinion uses the Ferguson amendment to link legislative intent to a ban on all but personalized guns.

The administration needed a way to link intent to new high tech guns, and Tim Ferguson gave it to them. In so many words, Curran says the legislature obviously intended to ban currently available handguns, for why else would the bill have added the engineers? They were added to evaluate the new technologies for gun lock designs.