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In a recent interview with Oprah, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris debuted her new stance on the Second Amendment. The Vice President, who had previously never met a gun control proposal she didn’t like, said that if “somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot. [laughter] Sorry, probably shouldn’t have said that! [more laughter] But my staff will deal with that later.”
Paired with her constant new refrain that her and her running mate Tim Walz are gun owners, the Harris Campaign apparently wants to send the message to swing state voters that while Kamala Harris endorses universal background checks, red flag laws, and a ban on so-called “assault weapons” (i.e., common semiautomatic rifles), she is otherwise very much pro-Second Amendment. So while she doesn’t want you to have an AR-15, your right to own and acquire handguns is safe under a Harris administration.
It is certainly quite a shift in the political Overton window for a Democratic nominee to feel the need to take even a moderately pro-gun stance and embrace the castle doctrine. Harris’s allies in the gun control sphere, groups like Everytown and Giffords, have argued for years that gun ownership in the home makes people less safe. The trouble is, there is little reason to believe this is a real shift as opposed to mere election pandering. Harris’s own history makes her sudden claims of support for widespread handgun ownership suspect. Her actions as Attorney General of California are the reason why Californians could not purchase modern semiautomatic handguns first designed after 2013. Her ban would last until 2023, when a recent lawsuit brought by my colleagues representing the California Rifle & Pistol Association won a preliminary injunction against the law in question.
Background: The California Handgun Roster
In 1999, the California legislature enacted the Unsafe Handgun Act, which barred the sale of new handguns in California unless they passed certain safety tests and included certain “features”. If so they were included on the State’s handgun roster and able to be sold new in gun stores. This prohibition did not apply to law enforcement, nor to an ever-expanding list of other quasi-law enforcement type government agency personnel such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, harbor or port districts, and the investigation division of the Department of Consumer Affairs. CAL. PENAL CODE § 32000(b)(6). They could continue to purchase handguns California law defined as supposedly “unsafe”.
Over time, the legislature has amended the statutes that mandate what features a handgun must have to be “safe” for different categories of handguns, (semiautomatic pistols, revolvers, and rimfire semiautomatics) and has typically “grandfathered” those handguns that are on the Roster but would otherwise meet the definition of an “unsafe” firearm under the new requirements. That is, as long as these older firearms were already on the Roster before the new Roster-eligibility rules took effect, they could stay on the Roster.
As of 2007, for a new-to-market semiautomatic centerfire handgun to avoid the “unsafe” classification and be eligible for sale, the handgun needed to have both a chamber load indicator (“CLI”) and a magazine disconnect mechanism (“MDM”), in addition to passing a drop safety test and passing a firing reliability test. CAL. PENAL CODE §§ 31910(b)(5), 31900, & 31905.
This immediately constrained the California handgun market, as most modern handguns do not have CLIs or MDMs. However, a few new guns continued to make it onto California’s handgun roster because those two requirements, while undesired, were not completely impossible to force onto certain pistols. For example, in 2012 Smith & Wesson released its popular 9mm “Shield” model, and made a compliant version that could be sold in California with an MDM and CLI. The California version of the Shield was thus added to the handgun roster and could be sold to consumers in the state. It would be the last major semiautomatic centerfire handgun added to the roster for a decade.
Enter “Microstamping”
Despite these strict requirements, one feature requirement passed by the legislature in 2007 had gone unenforced for years. The law included a requirement for microstamping, an experimental technology under which the firing pin of a pistol would include a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol. The idea was that when the firing pin struck the cartridge to fire a bullet, it would leave an indentation on the spent casing that law enforcement could then use to identify the handgun used and its registered owner.
The idea was silly in several ways. Criminals usually use stolen guns, not their own, so identifying the registered owner was meaningless. Even if it was a gun the criminal had purchased legally, they could file down the firing pin slightly to destroy the array of characters. Or, they could replace the firing pin with another. Or, they could make sure to collect their shell casings. Alternatively, they could just use a revolver for their crimes.
But aside from the comical ineffectiveness of the idea, the technology has also simply never existed outside of a laboratory setting. Even the gun-hostile California legislature recognized this, so they wrote into the law that it would only take effect once the Attorney General “certifies that the technology used to create the imprint is available to more than one manufacturer unencumbered by any patent restrictions.” Thus, microstamping did not take immediate effect, and handguns that had at least an MDM and CLI like the Shield could be sold new in California, along with pre-2007 handgun models that were grandfathered in.
Attorney General Kamala Harris puts microstamping into effect, effectively banning the sale of new semiautomatic handguns in California.
On May 17, 2013, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris decided to issue a certification that the microstamping technology is available to more than one manufacturer unencumbered by any patent restrictions. From then on, a semiautomatic handgun could only be sold in California if it had an MDM, CLI, and microstamping. The obvious issue was that the technology did not exist outside of a laboratory setting, and it still does not today. Making a few microstamped firing pins for an experiment is one thing, but mass production entirely another.
Chuck Michel, who is now my boss at Michel & Associates and President of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, said around that time to SFGATE that “[i]t’s just not feasible for manufacturers to build micro-stamping into their manufacturing process.” Gun control activists mocked this, such as Cody Jacobs of what would later be known as the gun control group Giffords. He commented in that same SFGATE article that “millions of guns are sold in California every year. If Smith & Wesson doesn’t want that money, another company will gladly take it.”
Time proved Chuck right, and Cody wrong. No new semiautomatic handguns entered the roster from 2013 on. Kamala Harris’s action meant the overwhelming majority of Californians who were not exempted from the law could not purchase popular handguns first released after 2013, such as all Gen 4 & 5 Glocks, the Sig P365, M&P 2.0 models, and many many more models.
An expensive secondary market quickly sprouted up in California. Because the law only applied to guns sold new in gun stores but not to private sales, people could purchase an off-roster handgun from a police officer who had bought it, or from people who had moved in from another state already owning off-roster handguns. As supply was so limited, off-roster guns on the secondary market commanded steep price premiums compared to what they would sell for in nearby Arizona and Nevada. One police officer in Pasadena was discovered to have sold over 100 off-roster guns, turning his exemption into a lucrative side business. I myself bought an off-roster Glock 42 on consignment in a gun store in 2018, paying around $650 for it, when the same gun sold in other states for around $400. I only got it that “cheap” because that model shoots the less-desirable .380 round. At the time, a Glock 43, which fired the more popular 9mm round, went for over $1,000 in California’s secondary market.
Boland v. Bonta ends the microstamping requirement - for now.
Various lawsuits after 2013 failed to kill microstamping, with the anti-gun California Supreme Court even reaching the ridiculous conclusion that impossibility was not a sufficient reason to strike down the law. But critical progress was finally made in 2023.
A lawsuit brought by my colleagues at Michel & Associates (including @slowdowncounsel, follow him!) on behalf of the California Rifle & Pistol Association won a preliminary injunction against the roster’s requirements of the MDM, CLI, and microstamping.
Judge Cormac Carney explained in his ruling that “the Constitution protects much more than the bare right to keep and bear any outdated firearm for self-defense.” He also cited our expert witness Michael Beddow, a forensic examiner for the Phoenix Police Department, who concluded that microstamping technology “was not suitable for mass implementation.”
While the State quickly appealed and the Ninth Circuit stayed our court victory as to the MDM and CLI requirements (the case is still pending as of this date), the State did not even ask the Ninth Circuit to stay our victory as to microstamping. Instead, the California legislature repealed the law, replacing it with a new law that plans to bring back microstamping in 2028 only if the Department of Justice “has determined that microstamping components are technologically viable” and other requirements for availability are met. In other words, microstamping returns if the current Attorney General confirms by 2028 something that Kamala Harris claimed was already the case in 2013 when she implemented this handgun ban.
Because of the removal of the microstamping requirement, several new handguns are available new to ordinary consumers for the first time since 2013. While the MDM and CLI requirements are still in effect due to the Ninth Circuit staying our victory as to those, manufacturers have released some new handguns with those components included to sell in California. Our market is still very constrained compared to other states, as not all guns models can easily add an MDM and CLI, but California-compliant versions of recent popular handguns such as the Sig Sauer P320, the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield Plus, and the Springfield Armory Hellcat are now available for sale.
Conclusion: what interviewers should ask Kamala Harris
I decided to write this article because all of the above is all very “inside baseball”, as people outside of the Second Amendment community in California are generally not aware of the microstamping law and Kamala Harris’s role in it.
Given this lack of awareness, the Vice President is probably very confident that no reporters will be informed enough to ask her about her role in California’s modern handgun ban which was only recently declared unconstitutional.
If a reporter who interviews Kamala has read this article though, he or she should ask her:
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Do you stand by your actions as Attorney General of California which led to an effective decade-long ban on the sale of modern handguns in California, until the law was declared unconstitutional last year?
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If so, how do you square that with your recent statements that make it sound like you do not oppose the right to own handguns?
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Finally, as to any handguns you own, are they on the California roster, or do you own a handgun California law declares “unsafe”? If the latter, did you purchase it using an exemption not available to regular citizens?
American voters deserve to know Kamala Harris’s true stance on the Second Amendment, including whether she stands by or disavows her actions as California Attorney General which implemented a modern handgun ban in the state for a decade.
Kostas Moros, Attorney with Michel & Associates representing @crpanews
Any opinions here are only my own. Become a member of CRPA or donate here: https://rb.gy/bnlru0