CA legislation news - the good and the bad

So we saw before that the CA legislature had passed a few new bills through their originating house and they were headed across the capitol for votes in the other house. I also treated you, dear readers, and the Letters Editor at the OC Register to my opinion of a couple of them.

First the good news: it looks like Sen. Joe Dunn has decided to table his "I'd like to make the manufacture and sale of ammunition in CA impossible so let's make it prohibitively expensive by adding useless costs" bullet serialization bill SB 357 for the year, although purportedly it's just for "fine-tuning" so he can bring it back next year, already having passed the Senate. John Gittelsohn of the Register has an interesting take on from beloved Santa Ana Democrat - Dunn says he's tabling it because he doesn't want individual police officers who pay for practice ammunition out of their own pockets to have to deal with increased prices. Everybody get that? He's admitting that his legislation would skyrocket the price of ammunition in this state, but it's ok for Jane Average to have to put up with a massive price hike, as long as cops don't have to (according to Dunn, because their departments don't pay for it - anybody smell a call for more government spending?), 'cause well, that'd be just wrong. Nice double standard, thanks Joe. And people actually say the costs incurred by businesses as a result of government legislation aren't passed along to consumers? Here's a Democratic state senator who's admitting that they are indeed passed along, but he doesn't care.

Another piece of (kinda) good news, AB 352, which would require that any handgun made or sold in CA would have to "microstamp" the model and serial number of the handgun on each bullet, as it fires (HA!), has been put in the inactive file at the state senate, where it will stay unless a senator takes the initiative to schedule it for a vote (which hasn't happened since it passed out of committee a couple weeks ago). If it stays in the inactive file, author Assemblyman Paul Koretz will likely turn it into a two-year bill, putting it in the same state as SB 357 and trying to get it passed by the state senate next year.

And for the bad news, AB 996, which puts additional pointless regulation on how gun shops store ammunition (does anyone think gun shops are the safest place for criminals to break into looking for stuff to steal?), passed out of the state senate last week, and is headed back to the assembly for a concurrence vote on the amendments made by the senate. Let's hope that the assembly vote is against it, like it was back in May before a second vote passed it. Today is the first day the assembly can consider the concurrence vote, so stay tuned.