Customer Reviews

The California Gun Owner's Guide

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I bought this book when I purchased my first firearm in California, in order to make sure I understood the laws and could own and use my gun legally and responsibly. I was expecting a plain-english explanation of California's gun laws. For example, how do I need to store my gun to carry it in an automobile legally? What are the CA-specific criteria for evaluating legal cases where a gun has been used in self defense? How do I identify national and state forest areas where target shooting is legal? Can a backpacker carry a firearm as protection from wildlife, or will he run afoul of concealed-carry laws in doing so? But none of these questions are answered in the book unless one wants to pore through 90 pages of the actual legal code: there's no CA-specific plain-english explanation at all anywhere in the book.

The front section "background on the laws" is generic safety and self-defense information that I suspect is not specific to California; I think the section is probably the same in all 50 books in this series. It was somewhat useful, but didn't really discuss California in specific, and spent a significant fraction of the time complaining that there is too much gun law rather than explaining the laws as they are.

Then there was a brief section about the federal law, which primarily consists of opinion (whining) about laws like the Brady Bill.

Then followed the 90-page "Main Section", which is nothing but the cut-and-pasted actual legal text of all California's laws ... as they were in 1998. An appendix includes the California changes through 2001. (I bought this book in 2006). Five years out of date, and no plain-english explanation whatsoever. It's informative if you're willing to dig through the actual legal text. And entertaining, too: for example you can discover that it is specifically illegal, in California, to hunt frogs with firearms. (??) But it isn't at all what I thought I was getting when I purchased the book.

After that are 15 poorly-written pages of ranting about how terrible the gun laws are including "Position Paper" editorials and "The Liberty Poll" (in fact this sort of material is interspersed throughout the book). Most of this seems to be written by coauthor Alan Korwin and I suspect is also boilerplate cut-and-pasted into all 50 books in the series. If you're generally pro-gun, it will mostly be opinion you already agree with. If you're pro-gun-control, it will be otherwise. If you're a moderate (like myself) it will just be more of the same old debate you're already very tired of. In any case, it's merely opinion and not particularly informative.

I also bought "traveler's guide to the firearms laws of the 50 states" by the same press. Though it only has one page on California, that page was significantly more informative than this entire book explaining what Californians need to know in specific.

If you're a lawyer living in 2001 needing a quick reference to the legal text, or you mostly want opinion screed similar to what you'd find on any pro-gun website, you'll be happy with this book. Everyone else should skip it and buy something else.