I’d love to, but Mom’s 81 yrs and needs my help and Wife won’t leave the Grandchild. And unless something drastic changed I don’t think you get a Felony rap first offense with a clean record. Years ago had a discussion with a Cop at 3am, don’t ask. My friends Wife had a toy souvenir baseball bat from the Angels in the back seat, we discussed how a loaded gun in the car was a misdemeanor while the toy bat in the front seat would be a felony. Screwed up or what?
I’m just telling you from personal experience how much it will cost you to get to the point where you’ll think you’re getting off lucky only being charged with a misdemeanor.
Now, it didn’t happen to me personally, but instead to a best friend of mine. He got pulled over by CHP for doing a ‘California Stop’ and when they asked him if he had any weapons in the car he acted like the honest and good citizen and admitted to a stored firearm in his vehicle. There was a loaded magazine inserted in the pistol. CHP hooked him up right there. The DA charged him with a wobbler that could have tipped to a felony if so many points on their secret scorecard added up to ‘felony’.
All told, he spent about $10k to beg the charges down to a gross misdemeanor. The legal ordeal lasted almost ten months with numerous court appearances.. The actual fine was only about $1000, but he had to do 100 hours of involuntary service and attend social rehabilitation classes. Then, he had a suspended sentence of 18 months probation tacked on during which time he was to ‘be in possession of no firearms’. I stored his guns for him in my safe for a year and a half. During his probation, he was registered as a ‘public nuisance’ where any other subsequent charges of any kind would be automatically draw the maximum sentencable punishment if convicted. He spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying, he told me.
That’s the reality. He thought he’d get a break from a cop by being honest, and look what happened. He wasn’t drunk, or combative, or had any other circumstances that caused such a draconian legal debacle for him. It was just a man with no previous record in his vehicle admitting to possessing a registered loaded gun after running a stop sign on a remote country road.
What galls him most of all even today is that what he was charged with isn’t even a crime in my state — and, truly, most states outside of California and New England. I could drive through Nevada in a station wagon with unregistered loaded handguns filling the vehicle past the windows with “unregistered guns on board” painted down the side of the car and its not a crime.
Don’t ever say you heard it from me, but if you ever have to defend your life out in public using an illegally concealed weapon in California... Drop the gun, take the cannoli. If they catch you, you’ll be lucky to only get a 25 year manslaughter charge.
Also, I’ve heard the “but we have to take care of old Aunt Mitzi” excuse for why people still live in California. It’s like I’m a Swiss citizen talking to Soviet-era East Germans who maintain that living under their benevolent Stalinist regime isn’t really all that bad when you consider the benefits that the German Democratic Republic has to offer: “Why, where else can one swim in the Baltic in the morning and then go skiing in the Thuringia forest in the afternoon? The weather is perfect! Besides, we can’t leave here... We have to take care of elderly great aunt Brunhilde, and the children are almost senior cadre members in the Young Revolutionary Pioneers!”
It’s your life, bud. There ain’t no wall preventing you from leaving. Yet.