LttE - Two more vetoes, please

Submitted to the OC Register on 6/8/2005:

In your two articles about bills in the state legislature this session (“How OC lawmakers voted on 29 key bills” and “Sacramento fiddles, state gets burned”), you missed a couple more examples of needless legislative boondoggles: AB 352 and 996, both of which passed the Assembly.

AB 352 is even more costly and useless than SB 357 – it requires every handgun to physically imprint each bullet it fires with its make, model, and serial number, at the time it fires! Maryland incurred enormous cost and saw no benefit from its experimental ballistic fingerprinting project, and this bill will have the same negative impact on law-abiding citizens and the same lack of impact on criminals as SB 357.

AB 996 seeks to regulate where a retailer displays product for sale – in this case ammunition. Don’t our legislators realize that the ammunition displayed in a gun shop is already in a place safer from theft than virtually any other retail item available, simply because it’s *in a gun shop*?

Both of these deserve vetoes as well.