How to Buy Ammo in California in Just 56 Easy Steps

I'm going to highlight another California case, but this one is about guns. California is notorious for some rather annoying gun control measures, but nothing tops the Rube Goldberg machine that they set up for purchasing ammunition.

This saga started in 2018 when the state banned the purchase of ammunition by mail. The next year they banned Californians from buying ammo at stores from other states and also started requiring background checks for retail sales. For those that don't know, background checks for firearms are the norm, but it's extremely unusual for ammunition and only California has this set up (New York technically has it on the books but the system is still not running).

So here's how it works: the law requires that you pass a background check, but you first need to prove that you are a citizen, because state law prohibits everyone else from buying ammunition. But California ALSO issues driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. This means there is no real way to know, just by looking at someone's ID, whether they're permitted to buy ammo to start their background check.

So you can't just show up with your drivers license. The solution state law requires is that you need to provide a certified birth certificate or a passport in addition to your drivers license in order to begin the background check. The court case highlights one of the plaintiffs who was adopted at a young age and therefore does not have the information to obtain a birth certificate. Remember the portion of the law which prohibits out of state sales? That means that guy is literally 100% prohibited from buying ammunition from anyone or anywhere.

Even if you get through to the background check, the system has been found to have an error rate of 99.8% (not a typo). The reason why it has such a high error rate is because the requirements are unusually sensitive. If you've never had to register your firearm, you won't be on the database and therefore you'd be denied. If you moved without notifying the gun database, you'd be denied. Once you're rejected, even for the above reasons, you have to start a slow process of appealing it with the state attorney.

I'm hella pro gun rights but this whole endeavor is still particularly baffling to me. Ammunition is impossible to track, relatively easy to make yourself, and you really don't need much to generate a ton of damage. You can commit a mass murder with a dozen bullets, and a mass shooting with 10 times that. My estimate is that 99.9999% of ammunition used by civilians is used in recreational target shooting, instead of offensive or defensive scenarios. It's hard for me to believe that this is a sincere attempt to regulate the flow of ammunition for the purposes of savings lives, instead of just a blatant attempt to make being a legal gun owner as much of a pain in the ass as possible.