I've often quipped that California has never met a gun control bill it didn't like, and history has largely supported that. Unless it's a bill that hurts the entertainment industry, it seems the state is more than willing to embrace pretty much anything that comes down the pipe.

There is no state that has embraced gun control as fully as California has. It's really not the whole state, of course, just that string of cities along the coast that just happens to dominate the state's politics.

And yet, it seems that at least one gun control bill just died an ignoble death, and one that many anti-gunners dream of passing: Mandatory gun tax requiring gun registration.

Earlier this week we pondered what might be next for SB 1160, Sen. Anthony Portantino’s latest attack on lawful gun owners that would force every gun to be taxed and every gun owner to pay.  Today we got our answer: NOTHING!

Sen. Portantino “gutted and amended” the bill, removing the odious language that would have taxed every single gun owner on every single firearm each year.   And CRPA was there fighting for you in Sacramento! This bill was such an absurd intrusion on 2A rights and a totally unnecessary burden for DOJ that the Senate Public Safety committee staff took aim at it in a scathing analysis.

Yes, this was billed as a tax, but it only works if every gun you own is registered. They'd have to know every firearm in your possession with minute details of it so they'd know how to tax it.

This was really just a way to punish Californians who exercise their right to keep and bear arms. That's what it was always going to be about. That's really what a lot of anti-gunners want. They want to make gun ownership hurt.

But this particular bill tried to go too far, too fast.

I fully expect there to be another go at this. California is where bad ideas go in order to be considered good ideas, at least with regard to gun control. There will be a step taken back to evaluate why this one met its demise, then it will be resurrected and marched forth like some necromancer's dream.

That's because the desire to make gun ownership unattractive hasn't gone away. The desire to know what you have and where it is hasn't, either. A tax seemed like an easy way to do that, and it will probably be used again in the future.

For now, though, we found that there is a line that even Californians aren't willing to cross.

If only it were because it was a violation of people's right to keep and bear arms and not because it was just too much of a logistical nightmare to try and implement. Still, when you're a pro-gun person living in a vehemently anti-gun state, you have to take what you can get.

In this case, what you can get is a big win. Now, the trick is to build off of this success and use to fight back against the encroachments we've long seen out of the Golden State.