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  • 2015-12-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Obama Begins Confiscating Guns by Force (en)
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  • On 27 December 2015 the web site American Column published the misleadingly named article BREAKING: Obama Begins Confiscating Guns By Force. The headline began with the word BREAKING, suggesting that whatever followed was an extremely recent development. It continued: We were unable to locate any developments pertaining to broad gun policy in California in December 2015, much less any suggesting President Obama was confiscating guns by force. The words gun-grabbing plan linked to a separate article off-site. That article was titled Forceful Gun Confiscation Begins In California, and published by the web site Mr. Conservative on 28 December 2013. Notably, in the intervening two years between those iterations, no gun grab executed by force transpired in California. The Mr. Conservative article contained much of the same text verbatim, down to a photograph of a purported firearm confiscation victim and an excerpt from the web site Downtrend. Neither article provided links to their source material. The Downtrend article, published on 23 August 2013, held that: While American Column's rehash was published on 27 December 2015, the Washington Times ran an article a few days later that noted: It appeared coincidental that material originally written prior to Rodgers' 2014 rampage (the 2013 articles published by Downtrend and Mr. Conservative and lifted for republishing by American Column) circulated at the same time. Nevertheless, social media users expressed concern that some sort of a gun-grabbing spree was underway in California, at the direction of President Obama. Those articles referenced California's Armed & Prohibited Persons System (APPS), which was not novel legislation [PDF], and which came into existence in 2001, nearly eight years prior to the inauguration of President Obama. Even by Washington Times' description, the gun surrender described was not indiscriminate but something triggered by family member concerns that were reported to authorities. It simply allowed for an emergency 'gun violence restraining order' option with respect to individuals armed with guns who were behaving erratically. In short, an article claiming that President Obama began confiscating guns (originally published in August 2013, republished without additional information in December 2015) began recirculating in late December 2015. At roughly the same time, news outlets reported a new law involving temporary restrictions on gun possession based upon family reports of an individual's compromised mental state. The former appeared to be purely scarelore, as no wide-scale confiscations occurred between the three appearances of identical articles. The latter was marginally true, but it involved the acquisition of a formal legal injunction based on the ruling of a judge. (en)
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