I’ve taken some time to look into the California law I mentioned earlier and while still horrible, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.
First, some background. California has a handgun safety inspection routine that requires certification for ever pistol sold in California. Manufacturers must submit pistols for testing before they’re cleared for sale. The details of the test I’m not intimately familiar with but they include dropping the pistol from a certain height and ensuring that it won’t fire. I believe that later on the law was amended to include loaded chamber indicators and magazine disconnect safeties, but I’m fuzzy on just when that would have happened.
This new law, if signed by the governor, will include microstamping the make, model, and serial number of the gun that fired it onto the cartridge in at least two places.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Pistols that are on the approved list as of Dec 31, 2009 will still be available for sale after Jan 1, 2010 provided that they never “fall off” the list. How does a pistol fall off the list? Easy: The manufacturer forgets to pay the $200 annual re-listing fee. Using this handy tool we see that there are already 1,315 handguns certified for sale in California.
So, basically California won’t have any new semi-automatic handguns available come 2010 that aren’t already on the list provided everybody wants to keep ponying up the $200 per model to stay on the list that have already secured a spot. For S&W this means $56k in re-listing fees.
So, provided everybody pays their fees, California stays awash in pistols, right? Not quite.
The DOJ has the right to reexamine up to 5% of the pistols on the list for safety compliance every year. This is intended to give them a reason to de-list a pistol if the manufacturing technologies change but given the climate in California I wouldn’t be surprised if they start using this tool to drop pistols off the list eventually. Then again, considering that they haven’t yet used that tool to get rid of guns that don’t have a loaded chamber indicator or magazine disconnect safety, that might be my tin-foil hat membership showing.
What is really of interest to me is that you have to certify pistols of the exact same design if they differ in color of all things. If you follow the above link to the CA DOJ database and look at the Glock models approved in the state this become readily apparent: They explicitly list the OD (Olive Drab green) models because these idiots wrote the original law not accounting for different color variants.
So, come 2010 any manufacturer that wishes to change their manufacturing method, or even just the color of the gun’s finish, will be subjected to the new microstamping requirement. In time that will whittle away at the currently approved list until there’s nothing left, unless somebody kutows to this new law and tools up for the microstamping technology.
I doubt any of them will.
The end result of all this, the intended result, will be fewer options to legal gun owners in California, fewer sales, and fewer armed citizens.
