Sounds reasonable to me. Can you tell us the legal way to transport hand guns?
Unloaded, trigger locked, stowed inside a locked gun case, travelling on a route that is "reasonably direct" to an authorized location (e.g., gun range).
If a cop finds a gun just hanging around in the car where it can easily be accessed, they would likely be right in assuming some illegality involved.
Absolutely, but that has nothing to do with this thread. I understand that the bill proposes to seize a car for unauthorized possession of a restricted firearm, not for improper transportation of a restricted firearm. Note that these are two different laws, someone could be properly transporting a firearm they are not authorized to possess, or they could be improperly transporting a firearm they are authorized to possess. The charges are unrelated.
In some cases unauthorized possession is going to SEEM pretty obvious, the person does not have a firearms license and they're found with a modern handgun like a glock. However, that isn't 100% accurate, there are a variety of circumstances in which that possession is still nevertheless lawful possession. For example, the executor of a will, even though they do not have a firearms license, can nevertheless possess a restricted firearm for the purpose of disposing of it in accordance with the will. There are other exceptional cases as well -- if they were transporting it to the nearest police station after discovering it somewhere, that is also lawful. And so on.
My point is that if the cops just go about seizing cars from people found with firearms then they are imposing punishment without due process, where the defendant had no opportunity to show up in court and prove that in fact they are innocent -- and they may be.
It's fairly responsible for the police to seize a firearm in a case where possession isn't clearly legal, because there's a valid public safety interest in getting potentially unlawful firearms off the street, and the inconvenience to the person who really did just forget their paperwork of having to come by the police station later with the right documents to retrieve it is relatively minor. But there is no public safety interest in seizing their car, and the inconvenience is much more extreme.