California’s Law Requiring Background Checks on Barrel Purchases Takes Effect on January 1

California is a state that is always looking for a new way to pass gun control. It doesn’t seem to matter that it doesn’t work, mind you. I mean, they passed laws regulating so-called ghost guns, and those seem to still be a problem, so we see how well the rules and regulations they create are adhered to by the criminal element within the state.

But hey, they figure they just need to hit the right law, and a new one will be going into effect on January 1st.

This one, they seem to think, will really do something about privately made firearms. 

California’s narrowing of gun barrel sales to licensed dealers only and background check requirement for said sales takes effect January 1, 2026.

Breitbart News reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the gun barrel controls on October 10, 2025, noting that the new law “will require all gun barrel sales to be conducted by licensed firearms dealers, mandating that said dealers conduct an ‘eligibility check’ before selling a barrel.”

The language of the bill makes clear that a five dollar fee will be added to each barrel sale to cover the cost of the “eligibility check.”

Of course, if a barrel is purchased online, it has to be shipped to a California-based FFL so the background check can be conducted.

This is just part of the rules put in place, which are designed to curtail the proliferation of so-called ghost guns, which are only becoming more common because politicians and media freakouts drawing attention to them as an option.

Yet this one is particularly stupid because of just how unenforceable it actually is.

First, let’s understand that barrels are unserialized. Even if California started requiring serial numbers on barrels starting tomorrow, they won’t be required anywhere else, and the firearms industry isn’t going to serialize everything just for California. That means those who want to build their own guns without alerting California authorities just have to drive to another state, find a store that sells them, and then buy one there.

Or, they get a friend in another state to buy one, then mail it to them from a private address. The company that made the barrel complied with the law, and good luck finding out that Joe Schmuckatelli in Hog Waller, Mississippi, mailed the barrel to his buddy in San Diego.

And good luck enforcing the law because of that.

Literally any barrel for a gun made before the January 1st cut-off can be justified as having been purchased before the law went into effect, and it’ll be damn hard to prove otherwise, if not impossible. Again, they’re not serialized, so you can’t just ask the manufacturer when it was made.

But what this law will do is create yet another hurdle for lawful gun owners to deal with in California, a state they already think of as hostile to their Second Amendment rights, and for good reason.

That’s all that will happen. Nothing else will change, and officials in the state will never acknowledge this law’s failures.

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