California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and state Sen. Don Perata, D-Alameda, went on the warpath against the National Rifle Association and other gun associations. The pair accused the gun lobby of waging a “campaign of misinformation” designed to pave the way for future lawsuits challenging proposed regulations that will enforce the state’s newly beefed-up ban on assault weapons.
The NRA and other gun representatives claim that the Department of Justice has drawn the regulations so broadly that they would ban many standard hunting rifles. The dispute centers around the definition of a “protruding hand grip,” one of the features defining an assault weapon under Perata’s SB 23, which was passed and signed into law by Gov. Gray Davis in 1999.
