We can try all we want to put a good face on it, but the fact is this is a huge, huge victory for the gun grabbers and trial lawyers. Even if every manufacturer stopped shipping guns to CA today, the millions of guns already in existence there would still put them in the position of having to defend the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lawsuit cases which greedy trial lawyers will handle for their clients on a contingency fee basis. Even if the gun makers and importers win every case, which they won't in ultra-liberal CA, the legal fees alone will bankrupt every one of them within a short time. Gun makers are not big rich corporations like the tobacco companies. Most of them are relatively small operations compared to other industries, and many are in financial trouble now. Just one big multi-million dollar award to one plaintiff would destroy even the largest manufacturer.
IMHO, this is the death knell for the firearms industry that the gun-grabbers have been hoping for ever since the courts in most state courts began throwing out their baseless suits a couple of years ago. All they needed was one large state to enact a law to allow them to litigate their frivolous lawsuits, and now they have the biggest state of all doing just that.
No firearms manufacturer has the financial resources to fight this. Unless congress acts soon to pre-empt state laws like this one, no currently active American firearms manufacturer or importer will be in business 5 years from now. There has been a lawsuit pre-emption bill lying around congress for at least 2 sessions which would over-ride this CA law. But it has never made it to the floor for a vote. Maybe when every American gun maker and every importer is out of business and there are no new guns left to buy, some of the 75 million gun owners who have so far refused to get involved in the fight will finally join a pro-gun lobbying group and begin calling and writing congress about this issue.
On 2nd thought I want to retract that statement from my last post. The vast majority of gun owners don't even care enough about their 2nd A rights to bother voting for a pro-gun candidate if the other candidate promises them more free goodies than the pro-gun guy. I don't expect them to do anything except bitch and moan when they lose the last vestige of liberty they now have. This nation is headed straight for an all-out dictatorship because of the apathy, greed, and class envy of it's people.