In 1967, California's first major modern gun legislation, sponsored by Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford, was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. The law, created to disarm the Black Panthers, banned the carrying of firearms in public. Sacramento busybodies continue to contrive new ways to harass California's gun owners. Just recently, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved an unprecedented ban on .50-caliber rifles.

The newest outrages, Assembly Bill 352 and Senate Bill 357, taken together, would mandate that all handguns imprint the make, model and serial number on each discharged cartridge; and that all handgun ammunition be "serialized" with identification markings. The idea is that police can track down criminals using the markings on their bullets.

Of course, such laws won't reduce crime any better than America's other 20,000 gun laws. Criminals, by definition, do not respect the law. They buy their guns illegally or steal them. There are hundreds of millions of unserialized rounds of ammunition in circulation. Banning ammunition production outright wouldn't stop criminals. Serializing ammo won't make a dent in violent crime, as we can see in the similarly conceived "ballistic fingerprinting" programs in New York and Maryland that have failed to solve a single crime since their implementation several years ago.

Having no effect on criminals, such laws would impose burdens on California's millions of peaceful gun owners and armed small businessmen -- the people who, in defending themselves, their families, their homes and their businesses, defend us all from thieves, assailants and rapists, deter crime, and protect civil society.

Isn't this the duty of the police? Well, not exactly. In the 1982 case Bowers v. DeVito the Seventh Circuit Court ruled that "there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen . . . The Constitution . . . does not require . . . the state to . . . maintain law and order." Accordingly, during the 1992 L.A. Riots, police evacuated entire city blocks, leaving store owners to fend for themselves, which they did. California has since banned the very assault rifles that saved the lives and livelihoods of those store owners, leaving Californians more defenseless.

Even by conservative estimates, more than 800,000 Americans use guns defensively against criminals each year, firing a shot less than 3 percent of the time. In contrast, police officers are more likely than private gun owners to shoot the wrong person in a given confrontation. Statistics showing that a handgun is more likely to kill its owner or an acquaintance than an assailant are deceptive. Gun owners almost never have to kill anyone to effectively defend themselves, and almost all incidents of people dying by their own guns are suicides.

Florida relaxed concealed-carry laws in 1987 and violent crime plummeted. The most dangerous cities, such as New York City and Washington, D.C., have the strictest gun laws. States with almost no gun control laws, such as Vermont and Alaska, have by far the least gun violence. Switzerland, the most gun-friendly country in Europe, is one of the most peaceful. Britain, with strong gun control, is becoming more violent, and now is considering banning long knives to stop knife crime. But criminals don't follow gun or knife laws, although they do know how to take advantage of victims disarmed by the government.

Fortunately, politicians have double standards when it comes to their own safety. Otherwise, how could we explain how so many feel comfortable in the company of their heavily-armed guards? With the war on terror, war on drugs and other occasions of law-enforcement militarization, it is nothing short of hypocritical and despotic for the political establishment to disarm us as they arm themselves with military-style weapons purchased with our money.

California is one of only six states without the right to bear arms enshrined in its Constitution. It is time that we become as progressive as Vermont, repeal our reactionary gun laws and treat the right to bear arms as the precious civil liberty that it is.

For politicians, gun control is a tool to win elections, disarm unpopular groups and render people ever more dependent on the state for their safety. For criminals, gun control laws are a blessing. For the rest of us, gun control means enhanced crime and higher taxes to pay for the political class and its legions of armed guards.