INFO ON GUN LAWS PASSED IN 1999 & 2000
INFO ON GUN LAWS PASSED IN 2001
INFO ON GUN LAWS PASSED IN 2002
When we started this site we had no intention of having information on it about California gun laws and bills. We planned to have original, independant analyses and explanations on gun control issues.
But, we discovered that information we were getting about California gun legislation was wholly inadequate. It was coming in too late to be of any real value. Nobody said anything about a bill until they sent a message urging us to urge legislators one way or the other, with no real knowledge of the bill.
But worse, we found that the information we received from advocacy organizations (about what the bills said and would do) was almost always incorrect. See the page on the laws passed in 1999-2002 to get an idea about some of the facts that our advocacy organizations aren't telling us about. We found this by getting on the legislature's web site and seeing for ourselves what the bills said (something we recommend if you can spare the time). This led to the realization that it is practically impossible to monitor the bills sufficiently in this way, even though you can arrange (when you access info there about a bill) to be automatically notified by e-mail whenever a document on their site is changed.
The HTML copies they make available identify changes with respect to the last previous amendment rather than existing law. So, after the initial bill, one cannot tell what they're proposing to do to the law. We have to start with the initial issue of the bill, then sequentially add the changes shown in the later issues, in order to obtain/maintain a version that relates back to existing law. This is time consuming.
The other significant thing we discovered is that the legislature takes a couple of days to get a document on their site, after the time that a committee or the author changes it, but they can change the bill again in a day or two. By the time we can see an amendment they make, they are very likely to have already produced the next one--and maybe even a third one. This is especially true in the time just preceding any deadlines they have to deal with. They don't allow time for the public to see and analyse the last thing they did to a bill, and maybe comment on it, before they consider doing the next thing. Life is easier if you don't have anyone pointing at your problems.
Until we see a good source of legislative info, we will try to keep the latest status we get from the legislature available on the site—and to provide readable, linked, and annotated copies of the bills showing changes with respect to existing law.