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This isn't so much a protest by S&W as it is a "Y' cannah break the laws of physics, Cap'n!" moment for them. Microstamping, as required by the law, isn't possible in a mass production environment.

The law reads in part:

(7) Commencing January 1, 2010, for all semiautomatic pistols that
are not already listed on the roster pursuant to Section 12131, it
is not designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters
that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol,
etched or otherwise imprinted in two or more places on the interior
surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are
transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is
fired

So three unique data must be written onto the face of the firing pin and/or chamber. A firing pin's tip measures approximately 1.5mm in diameter. That's the canvas you have to work with. Now while there have been demonstration projects (With hand-crafted firing pins) showing reliable imprints made of a few characters, the text of the law requires more than that. To squeeze that much information into that small a space, you need to use machine readable marks; something like a barcode.

In the lab, this works great. In the real world, however, firing pins and chambers wear. Schmutz builds up in fine little details such as the ID mark you're trying to make. To make the degraded marking readable, you must do a Fourier transform on the image to turn it from a messy spatial domain signal into a frequency domain signal. The noise from the schmutz is random and can be filtered out of the transform. (It's all at the origin if you're plotting the data on an X-Y plane.) The filtered signal is then inverse transformed and the original image is recovered.

Again, it works great in the lab, but not the real world. In the real world, large pieces of the "signal" can be completely missing. To compensate, the marking must contain at least 2 copies of the signal to be recoverable. (If some of you are thinking Nyquist frequency, you're on the right path.) If the marking is 2D, like a QR code, then there must be at least 4 copies of the mark; 2 in the X axis and 2 in the Y axis.)

Again, again, it works in the lab, but not in the real world. In the lab, you can pay an intern minimum wage to spend a few days carefully etching numbers into a firing pin. In the real world, you're making dozens or hundreds of pin a day. You must do all of the normal machining steps and then add in the writing process. How do you do that? Absent Harry Potter and some variation of a patronus spell, there aren't any manufacturing techniques that can mark each part with its own, unique imprint; not with this kind of information density.

S&W isn't doing the protesting here. Nature is.

The law requires that the individual weapon ID data not just be etched on the firing pin but also the breech face (bolt, breech-block).

Certifying these weapons will require state inspectors either at the gun factories or at a destination point(s) in California of the shipped firearms. The inspectors would have to disassemble the product and check the micro-stamps microscopically or fire the weapon and put the hull under the microscope. Or the weapon would be shipped disassembled. The state might contract bonded third parties to do the inspections at the factories.

Whatever, a new layer of bureaucracy will be required to enforce this new mandate.