Tag: police state

Protection Orders, Gun Training, And 3D Printing Laws Among Gun Bills Signed By California Governor

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of 10 gun bills into law that he says will enhance what he considers to be the state’s already exemplary record of firearms safety.

Newsom’s office announced the signing in a press release on Monday. According to the release, the laws are meant to reduce violent crime involving guns and reduce the number of illegal guns on the street, among other things.

They include a training requirement for the purchase of a gun, expanding criteria for the state’s extreme risk protection orders, voluntary firearms storage by law enforcement to prevent violent crime and suicide, and a requirement for firearms blocking technology on 3D printers in the state by July 1, 2029.

“California has been a leader in gun safety. Today’s laws continue that work – using data, prevention, and proven tools to help keep firearms out of dangerous situations and support communities affected by violence,” Newsom stated in the press release.

Senate Bill 948 will make a training requirement necessary for acquiring a state firearms safety certificate for the purchase of a gun. Existing law requires the certificate for the purchase, transfer, or importation of guns within the state within 60 days of the transaction.

The new law adds a requirement for a four-hour training course that must cover firearm handling and safety as well as a live-fire component. The law becomes effective Jan. 1, 2029.

The press release also touted the state’s Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVRO), crediting them with preventing 58 mass shootings and reducing violent crime overall.

Assembly Bill 175 expands this by allowing courts to issue extreme risk protection orders even if the subject of the order has not been notified. It also prohibits courts from requiring petitioners to show that exceptional circumstances exist that make the order necessary.

Thousands of GVROs have been issued since the first laws were implemented in 2016, the press release states.

“Between 2021 and 2024, the number of longer-term GVROs issued each year in California more than doubled. In 2024 alone, California courts issued GVROs against 1,727 individuals found to pose a significant danger of firearm violence toward themselves or others,” the release states.

Newsom also signed a law meant to prevent suicides by providing temporary gun storage for those who are in crisis.

Assembly Bill 1974 allows law enforcement agencies to establish programs to take temporary possession of firearms from those who request such. The law requires the agency to provide clear instructions on voluntarily transferring custody of a firearm and instructions on requesting its return.

It also requires the agency to ensure the person is not prohibited from owning a firearm. The agency must also ensure the firearm has not been reported lost or stolen, used in a crime, or part of an active investigation. Guns that are not picked up by their owners will be destroyed.

The law also exempts the agencies and gun owners from certain requirements for concealed carry and transfer of firearms.

Assembly Bill 2047 is meant to hamper the production of homemade guns that do not have serial numbers or other identifying marks. The law sets a deadline of July 1, 2029, for any 3D printer sold in the state to have firearms blocking technology.

This technology would prevent the user from 3D printing so-called “ghost guns.” These guns are most often frames of synthetic materials produced on a 3D printer with metal parts purchased separately. The fact that the homemade guns have no serial numbers makes it difficult to trace them back to their source.

The press release states that the number of unserialized guns has been on the decline in recent years.

“Seventeen percent fewer ghost guns [were] recovered as crime guns in 2025, bringing the decline since 2021 to 37 percent,” the release reads.

Gun rights advocates decried the package of gun laws, saying they are about gun control more than gun safety.

Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), was especially critical of the training requirement, which he considers an obstacle to legal gun ownership.

“It comes after California has already passed an 11 percent excise tax on guns and ammo, and carry permits cost anywhere between $500 and $2,500 in the state, depending on the county. SAF is currently litigating against both of those abuses and will consider a lawsuit against SB 948 as its effective date in 2029 approaches,” Kraut stated in an email to The Epoch Times.

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Florida Deputy Charged After Using Flock License Plate Reader System to Search Woman 300 Times, Another Deputy Arrested After Looking Up 17-Year-Old Girl in Police Database

The misuse of Flock Safety camera systems continues to grow.

On Wednesday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests of two deputies accused of improperly accessing law enforcement databases, including an automated license plate reader system that uses Flock cameras.

According to Gualtieri, Deputy Karl Gwynn, 57, ran 381 searches on a 35-year-old woman he had arrested years earlier because he reportedly wanted a relationship with her.

Of the 381 searches, 300 queries were made through the Flock ALPR system.

The second deputy arrested was 33-year-old Travis Stanton who allegedly used the police databases to gather information on a 17-year-old girl he was reportedly “romantically interested in.”

Per WTSP:

Two Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies have resigned and face criminal charges after investigators said they improperly accessed sensitive law enforcement databases, including the Flock camera system.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests Wednesday, describing two unrelated cases involving a former deputy’s interest in a 17-year-old girl and another deputy’s repeated searches of a woman’s information across multiple databases.

The first case involves former Deputy Travis Stanton, 33, who resigned on Sept. 25 after the sheriff’s office began investigating his conduct involving a 17-year-old girl who had filed a complaint with the agency. Gualtieri said Stanton used several databases to gather information about the girl and her vehicle, including running her license plate through Florida’s vehicle registration system using a computer in his patrol car.

In an unrelated case, Deputy Carl Gwynn, 57, allegedly queried a 35-year-old woman’s information 381 times.

Sheriff Gualtieri said Gwynn had arrested the woman years earlier and wanted a relationship with her. Unlike the Stanton case, Gwynn’s alleged misconduct directly involved the sheriff’s office automated license plate reader system (ALPR), commonly associated with Flock Safety cameras.

Gwynn has since resigned and was arrested on four counts of unlawfully accessing secure systems with his bond being set at $25,000.

Stanton was charged with unlawfully accessing secure systems and his bond was set at $10,000.

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Reporting of the RAF Fairford Arrests Blows the Idea of a ‘Free Press’ Out of the Water

It’s easy to forget that the western media – the so-called “free press” – likes to distinguish itself from media in authoritarian regimes on the basis that, unlike them, it asks critical questions of the powerful, reports facts objectively, and formulates its analyses dispassionately.

They do propaganda, we do news – or so the western media argues.

The feverish coverage since five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning close to RAF Fairford in the UK is blowing that claim all too obviously out of the water.

Here are the known facts so far.

Three white vans, bearing the logo of a genuine fuel transit company, were spotted by a local farmer on the road outside her property as she returned from a party. Police arrived promptly and arrested the men, who were all British nationals in their twenties.

On Tuesday, it emerged that one of the arrested men actually called the police earlier – seemingly the reason officers were on the scene so quickly.

Although the men were initially arrested on explosives charges, no “viable” explosives were found. Although they were arrested on terrorism charges, which allow for 14 days of detention, they were released on bail under normal criminal laws in less than two days.

It has also emerged that the men had several empty “barrels” in their vans, plus one that contained what police described disturbingly as an “accelerant”.

Actually, that was simply a reference to petrol. The stuff that goes into vehicles to make them accelerate.

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Today In Dystopia: ICE Robots And Pentagon Puppets

Fortune reports:

“The Trump administration is exploring adding robot dogs to the expanding arsenal being used by federal immigration authorities as they seek to boost arrests and deportations across the country.

“US Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a market-research notice Friday saying the agency was looking into the purchase of ‘quadruped unmanned ground vehicles,’ known as robotic dogs, along with a draft of the robot specifications.”

I guess it makes sense that the empire’s mad rush to normalize police robots would be spearheaded by the department responsible for persecuting immigrants; there’d be more domestic pushback if these dystopian machines were patrolling the streets targeting less marginalized populations.

I still can’t stand how the western political/media class keeps calling these things “dogs” to make them seem cute and familiar so that people won’t recognize them for the autonomous dissent suppression weapons they are intended to become.

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First Them, Then Us: America’s Shift from Police State to Prison State

“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.”—Robert Reich

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that undocumented immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024, compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per 100,000. Cato concluded that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

The government is using its so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and constitutional protections can be treated as optional whenever the government invokes security.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

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Romania’s Lawless Globalist State Puts Georgescu Back Behind Bars for 30 Days After First Cancelling the Election He Won

The Bucharest Court of Appeal has ordered Călin Georgescu—who won the first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential election—into 30 days of preventive detention, overturning a lower-court ruling that had allowed the former frontrunner to remain free under judicial supervision.

The decision sends the figure at the center of Romania’s conservative, anti-globalist camp—and the most trusted politician in the country, according to some polls—back behind bars.

The move has further intensified accusations from his conservative Romanians that the country’s post-2024 establishment is using prosecutors and courts to contain a movement it has struggled, and even failed, to contain at the ballot box.

DIICOT prosecutors secured the reversal after challenging the Bucharest Tribunal’s refusal to imprison Georgescu while the €1.1 million fraud investigation proceeds. Businessman Ionel Rusen was also ordered into preventive detention, with the Court of Appeal’s ruling final.

Even the appellate panel was reportedly divided over whether detention was justified. Two judges disagreed, requiring a third to resolve the split in favor of incarceration—a detail Georgescu’s defenders have seized upon as evidence that the prosecution’s demand was hardly self-evident.

Georgescu’s lawyer, Mircea Sinescu, reacted with fury. “It is a hallucinatory solution!” he said, adding that “paper supports anything,” according to the Romanian account of the ruling.

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Surgeon at Hospital That Treated First U.S. COVID Patient Claims Fraud, Deadly Protocols and Retaliation — Says Infectious Disease Chief Worked With State to “Restrict the Civil Rights of Unvaccinated People”

A trauma surgeon who worked inside the Washington hospital that treated the first diagnosed COVID-19 patient in the United States dropped a political grenade on Capitol Hill Monday.

Dr. James P. Miller told Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) roundtable, “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People,” that the head of infectious disease at his hospital privately admitted he was working with state government to restrict the civil rights of unvaccinated Americans.

“The head of infectious disease medicine at my hospital privately told me that he was working with the state government to restrict the civil rights of unvaccinated people,” Miller said.

“Including their ability to drive and therefore work, by making their driver’s license renewal contingent on their COVID vaccine status.”

That is not a conspiracy theory from a comment section. That is a licensed physician and surgeon, under oath in the Senate, describing what he said he heard from the man running infectious disease at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, the same hospital that treated “Patient Zero” in January 2020.

In a sworn attestation Miller previously filed for criminal investigations, he identified that official as Dr. George Diaz and said Diaz told him unvaccinated people should not be allowed to engage in society or hold a driver’s license, and that Diaz claimed he was working with the Washington governor’s office to turn that view into state policy.

Those remain Miller’s allegations. Diaz was the public face of Everett’s first-case response and an early champion of remdesivir.

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California Democrat Pushes Bill to Redefine BB Guns as Dangerous Firearms

Kevin Mullin, a House Democrat from California, is now pushing a bill that would redefine BB guns as dangerous firearms.

This is just further proof that Democrats will never, ever stop pushing various forms of gun control. Many Americans become familiar with guns in their youth by owning a BB gun. If you restrict these types of guns, fewer Americans will have that type of experience.

Is that the end goal here?

Breitbart News reports:

U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin introduced legislation Friday to close what he calls “a dangerous gap” by redefining BB and pellet guns as firearms.

If the redefinition were adopted it would require BB and pellet gun buyers to undergo the same background checks that prospective buyers of AR-15s, 9mm pistols, and other firearms are subject to now.

Daisy BB Guns used an X post to comment on the proposed legislation, writing, “[This bill] would include guns like the Daisy 880. Their goal is to eventually include all airguns. If passed it will treat airguns producing ‘high velocity’ as firearms. [The bill] was introduced… to the House of Representatives… it would add all airguns that produce 800 or more feet per second velocities in .177 caliber, and all pellets over .25 caliber.”

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Attorney Who Sued Hospitals in 40 States Over Ivermectin Tells Ron Johnson: 69 of 72 Patients Who Received Ivermectin Survived When Courts Forced Treatment — All 140 Patients Denied the Drug Died

Attorney Ralph Lorigo delivered striking testimony Monday during Sen. Ron Johnson’s roundtable examining COVID-era hospital protocols, telling the Wisconsin Republican that he represented 212 families across 40 states who went to court seeking alternative treatment for critically ill COVID patients.

Johnson convened the September 28 roundtable, titled “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People,” to hear testimony from patients, family members, doctors, nurses and others about their experiences inside hospitals during the pandemic. According to Sen. Johnson’s office, the event was the first in Johnson’s series of COVID-related hearings and roundtables devoted entirely to hospital protocols.

Lorigo told the panel that of the 212 families he represented, there were 72 cases in which he prevailed and ivermectin was ultimately administered.

According to Lorigo, only three of those 72 patients died.

“In all, I represented 212 families across 40 states,” Lorigo said. “I won 72 where ivermectin was actually given. Only 3 people died.”

That means 69 of the 72 patients Lorigo identified survived, a survival rate of approximately 95.8 percent among that group.

Lorigo then described what he said happened in the remaining cases.

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Bernie Sanders’ AI Bill Turns Software Into a State Permission

A US senator who led the call to use the Department of Justice to prosecute those he decided were behind “illegal” misinformation about climate change is now proposing a new way to use the weight of the state to decide who may, or must not, develop software.

And this time the target is artificial intelligence (AI), and the proposed legislation is much more far-reaching and dangerous.

A US senator who led the call to use the Department of Justice to prosecute those he decided were behind “illegal” misinformation about climate change is now proposing a new way to use the weight of the state to decide who may, or must not, develop software.

And this time the target is artificial intelligence (AI), and the proposed legislation is much more far-reaching and dangerous.

More: How the AI “Safety” Push Creates New Gatekeepers

Senator Bernie Sanders, along with Representative Greg Casar, has introduced a bill that would give the federal government unprecedented power over the development of this technology, including deciding who may develop it, and how.

We obtained the text of the bill for you here.

According to the proposal, a new cabinet Department of Artificial Intelligence would be set up, with its secretary appointed by the president, and this official would have the power to decide which companies may, and which may not, develop such AI.

Those allowed to do so would be given a charter, but with that would come a number of obligations, including giving the secretary access to their systems, staff, and physical premises.

The bill, which has been compared to a licensing regime, and as such is anathema to most tech industry players and advocates of free and open source software, would also give the proposed AI department the power to cut a company’s systems off from the internet, or disable or destroy them, if the government decides they have crossed the line. This would be a deathblow to open source and open weight AI development.

The bill seeks to define superintelligence as a system that “exceeds human cognitive performance and capabilities across most domains or tasks” or one that “has sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the destruction or disempowerment of humanity, including by overthrowing or undermining the Federal Government.”

An advanced system, on the other hand, is defined as an artificial intelligence system that is trained on computing power greater than or equal to 10^25 integer (10 septillion) or floating point operations.

And one of the precursor characteristics is the ability to “automate or greatly accelerate” AI research and development.

However, the head of the National AI Association, Caleb Max, said that “some CEOs would say we have already crossed the threshold set out in the bill, meaning this is a de facto AI ban.”

The bill also has a provision that has been described as the “corporate death penalty” – in case of reckless violation of the proposed law, its executives could end up in prison for up to 20 years, and other employees could be banned from working in the industry for ten years. Once a company’s charter is revoked and the decision is upheld by the Federal Circuit, the government could seize its assets.

Sanders compared this to the penalty for “unlawfully building nuclear weapons.”

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