SACRAMENTO, CA (August 23, 2017) — The California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees (CAL-FFL) is asking the California Legislature to reject measures they believe will significantly impact the ability of licensed firearms dealers to remain in business in the state.

SB 497 (Portantino) – Limits an individual to one firearms purchase every 30 days from an FFL. SB 464 (Hill) – Mandates costly new security requirements on licensed firearms dealers.

AB 1525 (Baker) – Mandates new warning signs be posted at gun stores and included in all firearm packaging.

“By limiting how many firearms we can sell to our customers and putting costly mandates on us, the legislature is hitting us from both ends”, said Mike Baryla, President of CAL-FFL. “These bills add to the ever-increasing number of unnecessary laws and regulations that restrict how, when and where we are able to engage in the business of facilitating the exercise of a constitutionally enumerated right.”

SB 464 is a solution looking for a problem. Data from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) show that while 70,000 firearms have been lost or stolen in California since 2011, only a fraction of them were stolen from gun stores (797 firearms, representing about 1%). In fact, recent reports have shown that a firearm in the hands of law enforcement officers and agencies is more likely to come up missing than those in the possession of licensed firearms dealers.

SB 497 seeks to limit, chill, and ration a fundamental, individual right by making it a crime to even apply for the otherwise lawful purchase of a constitutionally-protected firearm more than once every thirty days. This type of legislation will only fuel the underground economy as people seek to dispose of a collection—or build one, no longer feeling bound by the constantly moving goal-posts masquerading as laws in California.

AB 1525 (The Brady/Baker Act) not only requires new warning signs be posted at gun stores and included in all firearm packaging. It also places a strange mandate on manufacturing by changing their California only “descriptive materials” on their lawfully distributed and Constitutionally protected products, with a warning that sends people to a web address of an agency which is hostile to gun owners, provides absolutely no technical support to the consumer, and simply doesn’t have the expertise to do so.

The most frustrating part of this entire process, Baryla notes, “… is that not one of these authors has offered any evidence that their legislation will do anything to reduce gun violence.”

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