Authoritarian Drift: Rights by Permission
The Californer/10353638

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Californer -- There was a time when Americans exercised constitutional rights with little government interference. Today, in California, purchasing a firearm resembles applying for a professional license: a Firearm Safety Certificate, government ID, proof of residency, background checks, a ten-day wait, and now an email address for the state's Dealer Record of Sale database. San Jose stacks more requirements on top. As of April 1, 2026, the state also caps purchases at three firearms per 30 days — a limit enacted after courts struck down California's previous one-gun-a-month rule, which Sacramento rewrote and reissued in broader form rather than abandoning.

This isn't an essay about whether gun regulation is ever appropriate. It plainly can be. It's about a pattern that scholars of democratic decline — not gun-rights activists — have documented: rights rarely disappear all at once. They disappear one reasonable-sounding form at a time.

The buyer must also navigate a litany of attestations carrying legal consequences—including the DROS declaration under Penal Code § 28160 asking whether the purchaser has, within the past 30 days, checked and confirmed possession of all firearms currently owned or possessed, and the statewide duty under Penal Code § 25250 to report the loss or theft of a firearm within five days after the owner knew or reasonably should have known it was missing. The questions read less like safeguards than potential tripwires. An imperfect memory, an uncertain fact, or an innocent oversight can leave an otherwise lawful citizen caught beneath the grinding gears of the law.

I've lived this personally. I spent more than three hours inside a Bass Pro Shops store simply trying to purchase firearms, because the process is built to consume hours. Each firearm required its own individualized demonstration of use by the clerk, on top of the paperwork, certificate, background check, and wait. And it doesn't end at purchase. When the buyer returns — often weeks later, once the background check clears — the state requires a time-consuming recertification at pickup, per firearm, as though the buyer had never set foot in the store before. Nothing about the buyer has changed except the passage of time. It is simply another form, imposed for its own sake.

The clock doesn't stop while you wait, either. The DROS check is valid for only 30 days. If a buyer — a parent juggling a job, someone recovering from surgery — doesn't return within that window, the transaction is voided. Not paused. Voided. A new application, new fees, a fresh ten-day wait, and the safety demonstration all over again, as if the first month of compliance never happened.

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A pattern students of democracy will recognize

Harvard's Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, argued that democratic backsliding rarely looks like a coup. It looks like the slow accumulation of procedural hurdles and "referee capture" — neutral administrative machinery gradually converted into a tool that narrows who gets to fully exercise a right. That mechanism is worth watching regardless of which party controls Sacramento. Today it targets one constitutional right. There is no guarantee it stays confined to that one.

This isn't a fringe position. President Obama, no one's idea of an NRA ally, put it plainly: "I believe in the Second Amendment. It's there written on the paper." He argued for reducing gun violence through measures aimed at people who actually commit violence — not paperwork on everyone else.

What "just one more form" looks like in practice

Since 2019, California has required a background check at the point of sale for every ammunition purchase. In the law's first six months, DOJ's own data showed the system rejected roughly 18 percent of buyers — not because they were prohibited from owning a firearm, but because their paperwork didn't match a state database. By December, California had run 345,000 checks and turned away 62,000 people who had every legal right to buy ammunition, among them, reportedly, off-duty sheriff's deputies buying shotgun shells to go duck hunting. A federal appeals panel ruled in July 2025 that the requirement violated the Second Amendment; the checks remain in effect while the full Ninth Circuit reconsiders. A system built to catch the rare prohibited buyer ended up treating one in six law-abiding Californians as suspects first — a documented, not hypothetical, slippery slope.

The price tag on a right

A San Jose buyer pays roughly 10 percent combined sales tax on the firearm, plus an additional 11 percent excise tax under AB 28 — on top of, not instead of, ordinary sales tax. Add DROS fees, the Safety Certificate fee, San Jose's $25 annual per-firearm fee, and mandatory liability insurance no other property owner must carry — paid again in full if a missed pickup deadline forces a redo. Functionally, that's a toll on a right, and it doesn't fall evenly: a six-figure household absorbs the stack without notice; a single parent or farmworker experiences it as a closed door. A state that would recoil at a poll tax on voting has built something similar here.

Criminals do not schedule appointments to prove residency. The compliance burden falls, as always, on people already trying to follow the rules — and the state rarely audits whether a requirement reduced violence, or repeals one that didn't.

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The database question, apart from the guns question

California's ammunition system logs the buyer's identity and purchase, and retains that record. The firearm transaction worksheet even asks for the buyer's race — a field that doesn't determine approval, but does mean the state permanently retains a race-linked identity record tied to a protected purchase. Nobody fills out a race field to buy a book. Californians who worry about surveillance elsewhere should ask the same question here: who has access to this registry, and what might it someday be used for?

Recognizing the shape of the thing

None of this requires believing California is becoming an autocracy. It requires recognizing a shape: expand licensing until ordinary conduct requires a permit; build registries that quietly widen who counts as "prohibited"; let fees creep upward without a sunset clause or a results audit. What distinguishes healthy regulation from overreach is whether it's periodically justified with evidence — or whether it just keeps growing because growing is what bureaucracies do absent a check.

History offers a caution about facially neutral systems repurposed by whoever administers them — from apartheid South Africa's "fit and proper person" firearms discretion, to Weimar-era registration records later used to identify German Jews in 1938. The lesson isn't that every licensing regime becomes that; it's that a system's danger can live in the discretion its text hands to whoever administers it.

The nonpartisan question

The question isn't whether Sacramento means well. It's whether a right that requires this much permission is still a right, or has become a revocable privilege — a precedent every party should worry about inheriting next. As a candidate for Congress, I believe in prosecuting violent crime, investing in mental health treatment, and closing the straw-purchase pipelines that actually arm criminals — while asking Sacramento to defend, with data rather than assumption, every new layer it adds to the law-abiding. Show your work, measure the results, and repeal what doesn't work — or stop adding forms.

About Peter Coe Verbica

Peter Coe Verbica, endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Association PAC, is an independently-minded candidate for U.S. Congress, California District 19. He learned the value of a solid work ethic growing up on a cattle ranch in Northern California. He is a graduate of Bellarmine College Preparatory, holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Santa Clara University, and an M.S. from MIT. He is a Principal and Managing Director of Silicon Private Wealth®, a fiduciary and Registered Investment Advisor. He is married and has four daughters, the oldest of whom served in the U.S. Navy. He supports lower taxes, fiscal accountability, and government that answers to the people it serves — defending Proposition 13, cutting the red tape strangling working families, and rebuilding the ladder of opportunity that will restore California as a place to build a future.

(Image source: Illustration created by the author using AI-assisted image generation, Grok and ChatGPT 2026.)

For more information: https://peterverbica.com

Paid for by Verbica for Congress.