Other State CA AR laws, were there grandfather clauses?

[WAW44]

So a friend who lives in the bay area just went to a range with someone and they shot that other person's AR. The pictures I saw show standard collapsible stock and 30 round mag. I thought these were verbotten in in that worker's utopia. Did older rifles get grandfathered in or something?

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[User 1234]

Yes. There are also many different legal configurations which are not readily visible and depends which wave of grandfathering the rifle fell into. Third, there are plenty of simply non-conforming rifles there which simply have not been registered or caught yet.

 

[titsonritz]

Collapsible stocks can be pinned in place.

 

[dangerranger60]

If you registered the gun as an AW in '89 and kept everything as it was then You could still have it now. DR

 

[JuglansRegia]

There were multiple different bans so its kind of complicated.

 

[GWS]

So a friend who lives in the bay area just went to a range with someone and they shot that other person's AR. The pictures I saw show standard collapsible stock and 30 round mag. I thought these were verbotten in in that worker's utopia. Did older rifles get grandfathered in or something?

If you owned an AR or other banned weapon before 1/1/2000 you had until 12/31/2000 to register it with the state and that made legal for you to own one.

There was a lot of non-compliance and really not a lot of enforcement. You'd have to get caught doing something stupid like DUI or being a felon and having the weapon with you for their to be any assault weapon beef.

 

[nammac]

As for 30 round magazines, they were briefly "legal" several years ago. My brother in law stocked up during that brief open window…

 

[nwslopoke]

Are LEO exempt? I know one that has several ARs but never saw them, so I don't know the configuration. Also, in California, I believe they have several levels of what LEO is. Police, prison guard, ect. Some are exempt from certain guns that others can't have.

 

[User 1234]

LEO can ask their department head for an authorization letter to buy an "assault weapon" for duty use. The California DoJ however takes the position that once the buyer leaves that agency the "assault weapon" must be transferred to the agency or destroyed.

 

[GWS]

Magazines were grandfathered but anyone who could travel out of state and cared to, brought magazines back with them. Nobody checked them at the border. Then there were "repair kits" which were just magazines that were disassembled. These were banned along with the single shot exemption, which was a brilliant way of getting around the roster for a few years.
Then came Freedom Week which brought in a million or more magazines, while essentially legalizing every mag that had been sneaked into the state since 2000.