By: Teresa Mull

California’s recently enacted ammunition law is a disaster.

The law, which went into effect on July 1, “says if you do not appear on a prohibited-persons list and you have passed a background check to buy a gun during the time the state has stored those records in a database, you can buy ammunition,” reports Holly Heyser for Sacbee.com.

But because the state didn’t finalize the law’s regulations until the last minute, people didn’t have time to see if their names were in the database or if their information was correct.

Heyser reports:

In the first four months, the checks thwarted 101 ammunition purchases by prohibited persons, and a staggering 62,000 purchases by people who had every right to buy ammunition. More than half of the rejections were due to data mismatches, such as an address change; one-third were because buyers weren’t in the database.

That’s 620 good guys for every bad guy. My friends who favor more gun control always tell me, “Holly, we don’t want to infringe on your rights. We just want to stop the bad guys.”

And here’s the kicker: Those 101 bad guys were already on a list! They’re known to the state, but the state clearly hasn’t yet disarmed them, which is a huge problem.

For more on this story, click here.

Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at [email protected].