California has long been home to onerous and unconstitutional weird and wacky gun laws. It’s rare that I hear about a new regulation in California that actually makes me do a double-take, but I found one.
The roster of accepted handguns in California has been a nuisance to shooters for quite some time. In an effort to get around possession of prohibited pistols, gunsmiths would modify guns from semiautomatic to single-shot to remain compliant. Convenient? No. Practical? No. Thumbing their noses at state government? Yes.
Never missing an opportunity to infringe on the civil rights of its citizens, California law has been amended to single out these altered handguns. The new section of the California penal code now outlaws “a semiautomatic pistol that has been temporarily or permanently altered so that it will not fire in a semiautomatic mode.”
With the advent of polymer 80% GLOCK lowers, amateur gunsmiths can now make their own pistols just as they can with AR-15 rifles. This has also allowed California-based Inlander Arms to use Polymer80’s GLOCK frames to build a bolt-action-only pistol using their Easy Bolt design.
This is a big deal because beginning in July 2018, all 80% builds will have to be registered with the California Department of Justice, including photos proving how the gun was originally assembled. If you can’t prove the gun was originally built as a single-shot pistol, you’re out of luck.
The $150 Inlander Easy Bolt converts the slide – mounted on a Polymer80 frame – into a single-shot pistol without interfering with or modifying any of the parts of the slide and frame that interact with one another.
Once installed, the gun constitutes a purpose-built bolt-action pistol, thereby complying with California law. You load one round at a time into the breech and then operate the bolt to both charge the pistol and extract a spent casing. Inlander Arms recommends removing the extractor from the gun during your build process.
By utilizing this roundabout product, Californians have once again proven that necessity is the mother of all invention and that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Oh, and don’t forget that you can’t stop the signal, either. Once again: Convenient? No. Practical? No. Thumbing their noses at state government? You betcha.