“The Los Angeles City Council tentatively approved a measure to require electronic tracking of ammunition sales, and considered a second gun control measure,” abc7.com reports, preparing to get out the bloody shirt wavers. “In an effort to keep tabs on who is buying bullets in the city of Los Angeles, the city council approved an ordinance that requires gun stores and dealers to automatically email the LAPD after each sale of ammunition.” LAPD Captain Charles Hearn reckons that’s OK because dealers already keep logs of ammo sales. This just makes it easier to…you know. Be proactive! So what’s the second measure? Bringing itself in line with all of Massachusetts . . .

The city is also considering another controversial gun law. This one would require gun owners to store their guns in a locked container or disable it with a trigger lock . . .

The Gun Owners of California organization denounced the proposed ordinance in a statement: “Each and every time that a law-abiding citizen loses his life or the life of a family member because they could not get to their guns in time to protect themselves in their own home, that loss of life or even injury should be laid squarely at the feet of the LA City Council members who passed it.”

Wow. Sounds to me that the GOC are assuming this a done deal. Is it?

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80 COMMENTS

  2. I know I sound ignorant, but I thought the Heller reasoning pretty well put the Constitutional kibosh on that “you have to disable your guns” stuff.

    • Nope. The law is still in place in MA. And criminals love it.
      If the gun is not on your person, it has to be unloaded, trigger locked, locked in a vault and the ammo has to be a separate locked vault.

      • That’s terrible- even worse than the rules up here in Canada (for non-restricteds, we just have to lock them up, and we can lock firearms and ammo together). When your ammo is separate from the actual firearm, can it be loaded into mags, or does that count as a firearm part? In Canada, ammo in the mag, away from the gun does not count as “loaded”.

        • In MA, stored ammo must be kept in its original packaging and locked up — that’s a fire regulation — but you can carry as many loaded mags as you want, which is a handgun regulation. Stupid, eh?

      • and the ammo has to be a separate locked vault

        By fire regulation, ammo must be kept in a locked container in its original packaging when not in use. The law that specifies the method of firearms storage is silent on the method of ammo storage, and the fire regulations don’t go so far as to require a separate vault. The reg states:

        “(e) Exempt quantities of small arms ammo, primers, smokeless propellants and black powder shall be stored in original containers and such containers shall be stored in a locked cabinet, closet or box when Not In Use.”

        Exempt quantities refer to amounts that don’t require a storage license from the Fire Marshall — 10,000 rounds of certerfire ammo, and 10,000 rounds of rimfire, and 16 pounds of smokeless, and 2 pounds of black, etc.

        If you can fit all your ammo and all your firearms into the same vault, you’re way ahead (behind?) me. I keep my ammo in locked ammo boxes.

        My home defense pistols and long guns are kept under my control (on me or within arms reach) and they are always loaded. Stored guns are stored unloaded, just like the NRA says to do and the Commonwealth requires. And anybody who breaks into my home will be amazed at how fast I can load my stored guns.

      • @fishydude, the MA secure storage law went up to the Supreme Judicial Court, where the judges upheld it by going through the most embarrassing legal jiu-jitsu that I’ve read since Justice Douglas’ “emanations and penumbras” crap.

        MA does not give a sh!t about the Constitution. It only cares about the Democrat party.

      • Gee, sounds like more gun laws in MA and CA to ignore. Store guns empty and locked up….stupid. The safe has two 1911s cocked and locked and two FAL magss loaded with AP. This does not even count the several loaded handguns around the house within reach. I wonder what CA sees fit to do about those who reload?

    • “We must also address the District’s requirement (as applied to respondent’s handgun) that firearms in the home be rendered and kept inoperable at all times. This makes it impossible for citizens to use them for the core
      lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.”

      Heller at pg. 58.

  3. Californians –

    Y’all might want to buy small quantities of ammo… Several times a day.

    Bitch-slap their e-mail server.

      • It would not be terribly complicated to write or commission an email program that would, with one command, send an email for each round sold (e.g. 525 emails for a brick of .22 lr). A little more effort could have multiple sales sent at once, with them all randomly mixed together (e.g. 2 emails for 2 rounds of 9mm, a .45 ACP, 8 .22 lr, etc.). Make the data set so voluminous and chaotic it is practically useless to them and crashes their server at the same time.

        Stuff compliance down their nasty little statist throats. 🙂

        • Simple in the extreme. The trick would be to get the email account that doesn’t lock you out after so many emails. Usually, you’ll have your email account blocked after 250 – 500 emails in a day. Of course, you could just run your own.

        • It would be super easy to write such a program, handling the e-mail can be done via Mandrill (or similar services).

          As a programmer myself, I will personally write and host an application for sending these e-mails for any ammo dealers in CA, for free. Here are some additional features I believe would be necessary:

          1. Each box of ammo would generate 1 email. This will generate a lot of e-mail.
          2. Randomly change the formatting, output, spelling and spacing of the e-mails. This will make it very difficult to compile the e-mail flood into a useable database. Likely requiring a lot of manual intervention.

        • You want to be sure the council members who voted for this are assured their wishes have been carried out, so include every one of them as an addressee, both business, government, and personal email accounts.

    • Might be a fun way to spend a saturday: “I’d like one round of 9mm please.” and back in line. Get a hundred folks doing this.

  6. Ok. So flood the system. Make them regret this so much it’ll cost them. Buy every box of ammunition as a separate sale. Flood the LAPDs email so they’re back logged to hell. Oh wait, this does require cooperation on the PD’s side. Who knows if that’ll happen.

    • I bet the council has already figured that into the equation. The backlog would be part of their “solution”, rather than a side effect. Remember Maryland’s new laws in 2013? The state police were backlogged with purchases to check and asked dealers to hold onto guns ad infinitum. It’d be like the NFA process – the wait is intentional.

      • The MD and NFA delays are waiting for approval; the LA e-mails are just “we sold Joe Schitt 50 rounds of .22LR” advisories.

        Don’t give ’em any ideas though; didn’t a background check for ammo purchase bill almost make it out of the CA legislature this year or did Moonbeam veto it? Have a bad case of CRS about it…

        • “we sold Joe Schitt 50 rounds of .22LR”

          Do you have Joe’s address? I would like to have his ammo — oops, I meant have a word with him.

  7. It is just another measure to suffocate gun and ammo sales and lawful gun owners. The “death by a thousand cuts” strategy with the side “benefit” of the public deception that something positive and beneficial is being done. If anything it will create more opportunities for ammo and gun runners and thieves.

  8. The ammo sale requirement may be very onerous and may not be practical.

    The requirement to lock up handguns, even in your own house, just brings LA in line with many other cities, including cities in supposedly red counties like San Diego or Sacramento. The issue there is that if a gun gets stolen, the original owner is liable both as a homeowner liability for accidents and for enabling whatever crimes are committed with the stolen gun.
    Not commenting on whether it makes sense, but the Second Ammemdment lawyers are probably too busy with all of the cities that have similar laws to be able to spend much time or money against LA’s new gun lock requirement

    • Your entire post is full of malarkey. And has nothing to do with CA law.

      I suspect this would be struck down pretty fast under a preemption challenge

  12. Adam Lanza got his guns from a locked safe.

    Congratulations, California. Your dream of becoming Canada is almost realized.

  13. How would this not be gun registration by the back door? The mouthpiece says it will keep ammo out of the hands of felons and people with mental issues (The city council I assume will be on THAT list) but if it’s a log of sales, wouldn’t that mean you have to A) have personnel check each and every sale. and B) send police to confiscate the ammo, IF you can find these dangerous people? Smoke and mirrors, it’s just another way to build an illegal registration database of legal gun owners. (Look, this guy has purchased over 500 rounds of 5.56 rifle ammo, we MUST go do a no-knock search and confiscate his weapons and ammo, after shooting him, his wife, his children, his dog, and several neighbors, in the interest of public safety, er, and “for the children” of course! If we can get the address right… now where is my full auto rifle and body armor?)

    • More like they’d use the information about ammo purchases to justify the use of a SWAT team while serving a warrant for parking tickets.

      • Yeah, I only know a handful of places in the city limits of Los Angeles that actually sell ammo. I buy mine in Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena. That’s because there’s already a requirement in Los Angeles, has been for years, that ammo sales in the city limits are tracked: dealer has to see ID, collect a thumbprint, keep a record of name, address, ammo bought, etc. Difference with this ordinance is that the records were maintained by the dealer. If the police wanted to see them, the officers had to go to the dealer and look. My understanding is that the new ordinance (note: not passed yet, the City Council just passed a motion directing the City Attorney to draft an ordinance) changes that to require electronic delivery of the records to the police.

  15. What’s needed is a system where the members of the city council are personally liable for reimbursing the city’s legal costs when stupid laws that they know won’t hold up are inevitably challenged and overturned in court. As it is now, they just throw shit at the wall until something sticks, and the taxpayers are stuck footing huge legal bills over garbage like this.

    Or how about a “three strikes” rule: if you’re on the city council, and three things you voted for are thrown out in court, you lose your position on the council. It might encourage these shitheads to read the constitutions of their state and the US at least once.

    • “Or how about a “three strikes” rule: if you’re on the city council, and three things you voted for are thrown out in court, you lose your position on the council.”

      Now THAT I like…Good luck passing it.

  17. Can we say s-m-u-g-g-l-i-n-g boys and girls? The administrative overhead of trying to keep track of tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition will quickly render any attempts to track ammo sales ineffective. Not only that, restricting ammo sales when it is readily available just over the state line just invites bootlegging. The drug smugglers are going to have such a good time running ammo into LA that they may give up dope alltogather. As NASCAR racer and former bootlegger Jr. Johnston once said, “at 140 them trees start getting might close together . . .”. Running whisky was as much sport for those guys as it was enterprise. Statists never learn. This’ll be fun to watch.

    • Agreed, this law is so utterly stupid. A gang banger could go outside city limits where ammo sales are not logged, buy a few cases of tulammo and his crew would be set for years worth of drive-bys. Any extra they could sell at a huge markup to gang bangers who don’t have access to transportation.

    • This will be fun to watch.

      But from what I read this is simple an email to an address. It will be some automated system somewhere that will cache the messages as they arrive when they will go into some “big data” system which can build a simple database of who is buying what and when and where. The whole thing will only take a couple of IT guys to run. It will probably cost millions to turn it on, but it will only take a couple of people to keep it running once it gets turned on,

      What makes this truly dangerous is the “big data” the po-po will have. A simple search and you can see who bought what, when, and how much. “Mr Jones has purchased more than the expected 10 rounds of ammunition, we need to send someone over to check on him.”

      Even worse….. after Mr Jones goes off the reservation all of the Gun Grabbers will find every other person who has bought similar quantities of ammunition and target them for ‘investigation.’

  18. It is just another thing that will get no push back and may even get HOAs to jump on.

    Cops focusing on raising revenue instead of protecting the public, every HOA in my area has an armed officer. You don’t need to call 911 because criminals won’t get past the armed gate guard.
    Liability and HomeOwners insurance and HOA drive everything and all gun related stuff in private hands is seen as a risk and liability. The trend is for communities to require guns to be locked up or make it too expensive to insure.

  19. Don’t you just hate reading crap like this and then realizing it’s not some twisted Thanksgiving Day joke? Seriously, how messed up are those Californians? A few years ago, before I came to appreciate my eroding freedoms, I thought I wanted to live in LA. The palm trees are nice and so are the ladies, but the cost is far too high to even consider visiting. It’s like Don Henley said: “You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

  20. “Gun control? It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I’m a bad guy, I’m always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I’ll pull the trigger. We’ll see who wins.”

    ― Sammy Gravano

  22. The gun lock requirement will probably be pushed through with no resistance. We need to fix our liability system and HOAs. Guns are seen as a liability to be minimized by locking up… And not needed because you have gate guards and HOA security that is armed (which reduces liability and insurance). This frees the cops from having to fight crime and let’s them focus on their true responsibility of giving tickets and raising revenue for the city or state.
    The real problem is liability reform and police expectations.

  23. If they’re getting an email anyways, I might as well add an F-U to it.

    I’m not sure if this will affect the LAPD academy, or if it should change my purchasing habits if it does. The sad thing is that LA is solidly controlled by statist Democratics, who applaud ever ridiculous gun control scheme with great enthusiasm.

  24. Since a firearm disabled is not truly an “arm” but nothing more than an expensive paperweight, this sort of law is on its face, unconstitutional.

  25. Wow I thought Illinois sucked. Not so much in comparison. They sure do a great job catching illegal aliens…er undocumented immigrants…er democrats 🙂

  26. This Ammo purchase rule would be a city ordnance. Much like the need to record license when purchasing ammo in the city of Sacramento. The solution is to buy ammo in the county. So no need to leave the state, just head out of city limit and do your shopping.

  28. “Each and every time that a law-abiding citizen loses his life or the life of a family member because they could not get to their guns in time to protect themselves in their own home, that loss of life or even injury should be laid squarely at the feet of the LA City Council members who passed it.” — Gun Owners of California

    I think not just the loss of life, but the bodies of the dead people should be laid at their feet. I think the bodies, in their full rotting glory with blood leaking out, should be dumped out right in front of them at a council meeting, or in the middle of their family living room with a note, so they can see the result of their workday when they get home.

  29. A quick trip to the county, or heck, order on line from out of state and have it delivered right to your door. I ordered a butt load of ammo from lucky gunner and it was sitting on my doorstep 2 days later. It’s pretty much in stock there, reasonably priced (in comparison to other sites) and the customer service is exemplary. I’ve bought from them several times and will continue to purchase from them until I have a fair to middlin stash of ammo in all my various calibers.

  30. It must really suck to live West of the border. If you ever want to visit the US, Arizona is within driving distance. We have not built border checkpoints on the border with California yet, so you do not need a passport…at least not yet. Geez. Planning to buy 1000 rounds of 9mm and 5.56 this weekend, and the only email exchanged will be with my friends to compare prices.

  32. Next time a manufacture sells guns to a police dept. in Calif. send in to them in pieces and tell them to put them together.

  33. Flooding email servers will accomplish little else than justifying an increase in IT budget to handle the increased load.

    • Yeah, and that means it’s a jobs bill… 🙂

      And IT people tend to be Libertarian in their politics…

      And the POTG will be helping create jobs…

  34. After watching the vid this (so far) only applies to the city of LA – not LA county or CA state. None-the-less all the quicker they will adopt statewide if this isnt stopped at the LA level. I live just north of LA county so im going to keep an eye on it… Thanks TTAG for post.

  35. IF YOU ‘ OBEY ‘ these politicians…YOU deserve what ever happens to YOU and yours…YOUR FAULT ONLY….because a politician is NEVER held accountable for anything….imho

  36. All this does is give the gang-bangers and home invaders a guaranteed 30-45 second head start when they break into your home, if you’re dumb enough to actually follow this law.

    This proposed law is a very thinly veiled attempt to enact a law that would allow law enforcement into the average citizens home to “Check” their weapons for proper storage. California is number one on my list of states I will never live in or even visit.

  37. Perhaps LAPD can pay house calls on the LA street gang members, just to be sure their gats are stored properly.
    Just kidding, these laws are to go after lawful gun owners.

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