California is one of just a handful of states that require gun owners to undergo a background check every time they purchase ammunition, and while paying even a penny in government fees in order to exercise a civil right is a problem, the $1 fee probably hasn’t been much of a financial burden on most residents.
That, however, is about to change.
Earlier this month California’s Office of Administrative Law approved the fee increase and filed the new regulation with the Secretary of State. Starting on July 1, 2025, the fee for conducting ammunition background checks will increase fivefold, and gun owners will feel the pinch.
When the fee increase was first proposed last year, California gun owners vociferously complained about the move, citing a number of valid objections:
Increasing the current fee for ammo background checks by 500% is excessive and burdensome. Very few people purchase their ammunition for the entire year in a single retail transaction. Increasing the fee disproportionately affects women, people of color, and other disadvantaged individuals. By making ammunition less affordable, this fee could reduce firearm safety because regular practice is essential for safe and responsible firearm use. The fee increase will not enhance public safety and will make self-defense harder for individuals.The fee increase may push people towards the black market and encourage people to make their own ammunition. Making ammunition less affordable could restrict access to shooting sports, especially for youth shooters who are learning responsible gun handling under supervised and structured environments.
The fee increase is going to have a couple of immediate effects, in my opinion. First, people are going to buy more ammo at one time than they did when the background check fee was only a dollar. There will also be more attempts to circumvent California’s ammunition background check law by driving across the state line into Nevada and Arizona to purchase ammunition, which does carry some legal risk.
And honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see anti-gun lawmakers in Sacramento now try to impose purchase limits on ammunition. Five states, including California, already restrict gun sales to one every 30 days, but no state has a restriction on how many rounds of ammunition can be purchased within a particular time period. New York came closest back in 2020 when a bill was introduced restricting ammunition purchases for “assault weapons” to 20 rounds every 120 days, but it failed to get out of committee.
If California gun owners start buying five or six months worth of ammo at one time to mitigate the increase of the background check fee, I suspect there’ll be no shortage of legislators clamoring to crack down on that practice by making it illegal to purchase more than 200, 100, or 50 rounds (or some other arbitrary figure) per month. Anti-gun Democrats want to make it as costly as possible to exercise our right to keep and bear arms, and that would be a relatively easy (albeit unconstitutional) way to make gun ownership in the Golden State even more expensive than it already is.
As Kostas Moros pointed out in his post on X, there is a legal challenge to the state’s ammunition background check law already underway. U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez found the law unconstitutional in early 2024, but his decision was stayed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard its own oral arguments in the case in December, 2024. We’re still waiting to see what the Ninth Circuit will decide, but if they uphold the law then the next step for the lawsuit will be cert petition filed with the Supreme Court.
That won’t happen fast enough to negate the increase that’s coming in just a few weeks, but jacking up the cost of the background checks may actually improve the odds of SCOTUS granting cert and giving gun owners relief, given that the financial harm and burden will soon increase fivefold. In the short term, however, California gun owners are either going to be paying more for ammunition or risk criminal charges for daring to stock up at shops in Free America.
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