California’s new ammo law hurts the wrong people — and doesn’t stop ‘bad guys’ with guns
When California started requiring people to pass background checks to buy ammunition on July 1, hunters hoped for the best and braced for the worst. What happened was far worse than we feared.
The premise of the new law is that people who can’t have guns shouldn’t have ammo either. I don’t know anyone who disputes that. Bad guys shouldn’t have guns or ammo.
The law says if you do not appear on a prohibited-persons list and you have passed a background check to buy a gun during the time the state has stored those records in a database, you can buy ammunition. Simple, right?
Here’s where it fell apart: The state Department of Justice finalized regulations to implement the law just before it took effect. There was no time, and no effort, to raise awareness, no time for gun owners to verify they were in the database, and most critically, that their ID matched their information in the database.
In the first four months, the checks thwarted 101 ammunition purchases by prohibited persons, and a staggering 62,000 purchases by people who had every right to buy ammunition. More than half of the rejections were due to data mismatches, such as an address change; one-third were because buyers weren’t in the database.
That’s 620 good guys for every bad guy. My friends who favor more gun control always tell me, “Holly, we don’t want to infringe on your rights. We just want to stop the bad guys.”
This law sure didn’t work out that way.
And here’s the kicker: Those 101 bad guys were already on a list! They’re known to the state, but the state clearly hasn’t yet disarmed them, which is a huge problem.
A Dec. 11 Sacramento Bee article paraphrased proponents of the law comparing this system “to a traveler having to go through security at an airport.”
Sure, if this is how airport security worked: TSA turns away one in five travelers. Rejects include cops, active-duty military, concealed weapon permit holders (who undergo rigorous background checks) and septuagenarians who like to go bird hunting a couple times a year. They may not learn why they were denied. They must navigate a confusing system for getting into the good-guy database or updating their name or address in that database. The agency that denied them won’t talk to them. They keep driving to the airport to see if they can get through. Maybe they can board a plane weeks later.
This is not hypothetical. These are real experiences of people I’ve connected with. And they’re flummoxed.
Don’t see any problem with people having to wait weeks to buy ammo? We do. Hunting seasons are finite. If you don’t have ammo, you can’t go hunting. On the eve of the state’s first bird seasons, hunting license sales plummeted, and they had not rebounded by Dec. 1. People gave up.
The absurd rejection rate isn’t the only problem.
The new background check rules apparently have no provisions for non-California residents who want to buy ammunition in the state. By our calculation based on data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in 2018-19, more than 7,300 non-residents spent $1.2 million here on hunting licenses, in addition to other travel expenses. What are they supposed to do?
And people who don’t own guns – like many new hunters – can’t get into the state database, so until they buy a gun, they must pay $19 for a background check that can take days, every time they buy ammunition, even for a $15 box of bird-hunting shells.
Maybe you don’t care because you don’t hunt, and you’re not sure why anyone hunts anymore.
But you should care. Hunting is an honorable and sustainable way to put free-range meat on our families’ tables. Hunting instills in us deep concern for, and connection to, our wildlands. Hunters create and protect habitat for all species, not just game species.
California, if you want to keep guns and ammo out of bad guys’ hands, invest in disarming the 8,000-plus armed prohibited persons listed by DOJ. There was a bill this year to help make a dent in that list – SB 257 by Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Fresno – but it didn’t make it past the Assembly.
And if you’re serious about not wanting to infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, please put some effort into creating a system that doesn’t wreak havoc on us. We’re not the problem.
Holly Heyser, an avid adult-onset waterfowl hunter, is communications director for the hunter-based conservation organization California Waterfowl. She spends her free time helping new hunters explore hunting, shooting, cleaning and cooking game, and – increasingly – navigating regulations.
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