Yet politicians eager to curb Americans' Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms" keep pushing for tighter laws to grab more guns.

A good example is California's Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS), defined by Attorney General Rob Bonta's website as "a database populated with data from a number of existing DOJ databases."

How's that for a bureaucratic phrase?

The APPS data "identify criminals who are prohibited from possessing firearms subsequent to the legal acquisition of firearms or registration of assault weapons."

In English, they're felons or others who previously had bought guns, but were banned from owning them. Yet they continued to hold the guns, or are suspected of having them.

"The APPS program"—weirdly defined by the AG as a system and a program—"is a highly sophisticated investigative tool that provides law enforcement agencies with information about gun owners who are legally prohibited from possessing firearms."

APPS was actually started by Republicans with Senate Bill 950 in 2001, by Senate Minority Leader Jim Brulte (later party chairman). It passed unanimously in both houses and was signed by then-governor Gray Davis.

Trying to get ahead of the curve on crime issues, Republicans periodically decry the backlog of APPS cases, a safe way to seem tough on crime while not directly offending their pro-gun constituency. One example was a 2018 letter by the Senate GOP Caucus to then-attorney general Xavier Becerra (now a U.S. Senator), blasting him for allowing 10,226 delinquent cases.