From the Sacramento Bee:

Thousands of lawful California gun owners are being denied ammunition purchases. Here’s why

Zachary Berg usually buys guns and ammunition with relative ease. After all, he’s a Sutter County sheriff’s deputy and needs them for his job. California’s stringent gun laws usually don’t apply to him.

But Berg couldn’t buy shotgun shells at his local hardware store in Yuba City prior to a duck hunting trip last month. He was rejected under California’s stringent ammunition background check program that took effect July 1, because his personal information didn’t match what state officials had in their database.

Sorry if this makes me sound like a dick, but if there is one upside to the Left’s growing anti-cop attitude, it’s police no longer getting special exemptions for restrictive gun laws.

Berg was one of tens of thousands of Californians who have been turned away from buying ammunition at firearms and sporting goods stores, even though they appear to be lawfully able to do so, a Sacramento Bee review of state data shows. Between July 1 and November, nearly one in every five ammunition purchases was rejected by the California Department of Justice, the figures show.

One in five.  That is 20% of all ammo sales.

Think about what that might do to the financials of a gun store.

Of the 345,547 ammunition background checks performed, only 101 stopped the buyer because he or she was a “prohibited person” who can’t legally possess ammunition, according to state Department of Justice data.

So 0.03% of attempted ammo sales were by criminals.  So why were the other 19.97% of sales denied?

Yet another 62,000 ammunition purchases were rejected as well. Those people left empty-handed because their personal information hadn’t been entered into the state’s system, or the information on their identification cards didn’t match what officials had entered into the California gun registry database, which retail sellers must review when they do the ammunition background check.

So law-abiding citizens were denied their rights because of bureaucratic errors.

“It’s a little ironic the fact I’m a deputy that I can’t buy ammunition,” Berg said. “But at the same time, anybody else who’s legally allowed to, they shouldn’t be denied based on address (errors). … It’s just crazy.”

It’s not ironic and it’s not crazy, it is the system working the way the California legislature intended.  To be a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare where your rights go to die with no accountability.

But to gun-rights advocates, the mass denials are confirmation of their long-standing assertion that liberal gun-control laws disproportionately burden law-abiding gun owners who follow the rules, even as criminals continue to acquire guns and ammunition without jumping through the regulatory hoops.

Plain as day, clear as crystal, that’s the point.

The rejections appear to have occurred because of errors and omissions in the Department of Justice’s own gun-registration database.

So the state makes a mistake, the citizen pays for it, and the bureaucrat who made the error is not punished.  Seems like California has fully modeled itself off the Soviet Union now.

Beginning in 2014, Californians who’ve bought a shotgun or a rifle are in the database, and handgun owners have been in the system for even longer. If a gun owner has a weapon in the database, and their government-issued identification card matches the gun registry, an ammunition buyer pays the state a $1 fee for each ammo transaction, and then he or she walks out of the store with their ammo in a couple of minutes.

Those who don’t have a gun in the Department of Justice’s system are required to pay the state a $19 fee and undergo a more comprehensive background check, a process that can take days, or they can go online and register a firearm in the database.

Something, something, motherfucking poll tax.

Dan Logan, a 72-year-old retired California Highway Patrol officer and Vietnam veteran, said he attempted to register a shotgun this fall so that he could have his information in the Department of Justice system, yet he was still denied in October when he tried to buy a box of shotgun shells at his local Big 5 sporting goods store in Folsom.

To him, the experience was especially frustrating, given the gun-control laws voters passed in 2016 also prohibit him from traveling out of state to stock up on ammunition.

“If I go to Nevada and buy ammunition there, I can go to jail,” he said.

And we’ve hit the nail on the head.   The whole point of this is to disarm law-abiding California gun owners by denying them ammo by way of an unaccountable, opaque bureaucracy.  If they try an end-run around the bureaucracy, the way residents of the other 49 states can, they go to jail.

Gun-control advocates say the issues ammunition buyers are having are merely minor inconveniences that will get sorted out as the database is updated.

Ari Freilich, an attorney with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, likened it to a traveler having to go through security at an airport. He said the system is already working as intended. He pointed to the 101 people who were legally forbidden from possessing ammunition being prohibited from buying it. He argues an unknown number of other dangerous people likely didn’t make the attempt, knowing they’d be caught breaking the law.

Because everybody loves the TSA.

“Any one of those people, they were committing a serious crime trying to acquire a product designed to take human life,” Freilich said. “And they were stopped from doing so in that moment.”

No, they are getting ammo from Nevada or Arizona from gang members, the way people buy cartons of cigarettes from Delaware Indian reservations and sell them loose in NYC to avoid the tax.

Gun-rights groups argue the new ammunition registration is being used as a de facto gun registration system, because gun owners who’ve never registered a weapon must now be entered into the system.

Ding, ding, ding!!!

But Freilich argues it’s critical to have an up-to-date registry of California’s firearm owners so that law enforcement agencies can use it to remove guns from dangerous people.

Under the state’s “red flag” laws, Californians can petition a court to have police remove firearms from those threatening to harm themselves or others. The law was recently expanded to allow teachers, employers and coworkers to seek the temporary removal of firearms from the homes of people making threats.

“Because of this DOJ database, (it) allows law enforcement to know that that person has arms, to know what kind of arms they have and to know where they reside, so they can ensure that the people who have been subject to threats are safe and that guns are removed from that dangerous situation,” he said.

They are admitting to everything we said would happen.  Our nightmare is their wet dream.

Hunting associations say the mass rejections were a one-two punch for California’s already shrinking ranks of hunters.

When they could find the ammo they are legally required to use in the field, many hunters were unable to buy it.

Hunting groups argue the ammunition rejections and the lack of availability are reflected in a noticeable spike in year-over-year declines in hunting license sales.

This year, 10,631 fewer Californians bought hunting licenses than they did at this point the previous year, according to data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. That’s about double the decline in license sales in 2018.

In California, around a quarter of the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget is paid through hunting and fishing license sales and taxes on their firearms and gear. The funds go to pay for state wildlife programs such as habitat restoration and refuges.

Here is what is going to happen.  The government is killing off hunting because it is a large part of the gun culture that they hate.  Then they are going to bemoan the budget shortfall the comes from a lack of hunting licenses and tags.  Then they will try and figure out how to make up the funds by screwing over gun owners more.

How do I know this?  California upped the gas tax to encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars like hybrids.  Then they bemoaned the loss of gas tax revenue when people bought less gas and are trying to figure out how to tax hybrid drivers more.

Fiona Benjamin, 23, is one of the new hunters the state is actively trying to recruit, but she said she found herself blocked from purchasing ammunition this fall because she hadn’t registered a gun. Up to that point, she’d borrowed a friend’s shotgun when she was out in the field.

In order to get registered to buy ammo, Benjamin, a recent UC Davis graduate from Half Moon Bay, said she did what California lawmakers, who are wary of having more guns and ammunition in circulation, probably didn’t intend when they passed their gun legislation.

She bought a new shotgun, and she said she plans on stockpiling ammunition when she clears the Department of Justice’s system.

“I’m probably going to buy a whole case of the stuff I like to shoot to avoid problems in the future,” Benjamin said.

Except… the seller has to report the number of rounds sold.  I can easily see California decided that buying a couple of cases to avoid the hassle, later on, is something worth red-flagging a person over.  How do they know that you are stocking up for a couple of matches and not a mass shooting?

This feels like another trap aimed to catch law-abiding gun owners and turn them into criminals.

This video is from the Sac Bee and shows what buying ammo in California is like.