The California Department of Justice announced this week that registration for “assault weapons” will re-open on Jan. 13, 2022, and remain open for 90 days until April 12, 2022.
A federal court ruled that the state must re-open the registration process after the original launch was plagued by bad information and technical difficulties. The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) leveled a lawsuit against California after the fiasco, and the court agreed that the state had dropped the ball.
“Law-abiding California gun owners were not responsible for the failure of the registration process, and we’re delighted with the outcome of our lawsuit to set things right,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “When a process that should be user-friendly becomes a fiasco, it’s the government’s responsibility to correct the problem and the affected citizens should not suffer any consequences.
“We will be closely monitoring the process when it begins in January, to make sure this time around everything works as it is supposed to,” Gottlieb said.
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Not every California gun owner will be eligible to register their “assault weapon.” The state laid out four requirements that must be met for an individual to use the new registration process:
- The person would have been eligible to register an assault weapon under subdivision (b) of Penal Code § 30900;
- The person lawfully possessed each assault weapon they seek to register before January 1, 2017;
- The person verifies under penalty of perjury that they attempted to register the assault weapon prior to the original registration deadline of midnight on July 1, 2018, but they were unable to do so because of technical difficulties during the registration process; and
- The person timely registers the assault weapon between 9 a.m. on January 13, 2022, and 9 a.m. on April 12, 2022.
The California DOJ has not said how or if they plan to verify that a gun owner tried to use the online system but was unable to.
As GunsAmerica reported at the time, a vanishingly small group of gun owners registered their firearms the first time around. At the end of the registration period in 2018, 6,213 individuals successfully registered 13,519 “assault weapons” before the deadline, according to Deputy Attorney General Robert D. Wilson.
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The numbers were likely low in part due to non-compliance and in part due to technical issues. Franklin Armory’s Jay Jacobson told us at the time that he tried unsuccessfully to register his AR-15 three separate times. In all three instances, his registration attempts were delayed but he wasn’t given a rationale.
Other gun owners were discouraged from registering their firearms after reports emerged that Californians had been prosecuted for illegal firearms after good-faith attempts to register their weapons.
This time around, the state is allowing gun owners to register their firearms online and via paper forms.