A controversial bill to ban traditional lead ammunition in California by Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, passed both houses of the Legislature last week. But according to representatives of labor and trade unions, animal rights activists pressured Rendon and lawmakers to ignore science while turning a deaf ear to voters.
Assembly Bill 711 passed largely because of concern over the poisoning of the California condor. But the bill was amended at the 11th hour in a secret deal to postpone the effective date until 2019. If the need for the bill is really over concerns about poisoned Condors, what about the thousands of great birds which will have died by the time the bill finally goes into effect six years from now?
But not all of the state’s Democrats voted for AB711; representatives of rural areas in the state voted against the bill, or abstained.
Motive: A total ban on hunting
The bill isn’t really about concerns over condors or lead poisoning, according to two opponents. They are Mark Gagliardi, a trustee of the Contra Costa Central Labor Council; and Lawrence Keane, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the shooting, hunting and firearms industry.
Gagliardi, a labor union leader, is very frustrated with Democratic Assembly and Senate members he helped get elected, but who voted for passage of AB711. “This bill will hurt the shooting industry, retailers and hunting,” Gagliardi told me in an interview. “They are making hunting unaffordable, and killing California jobs.”
Gagliardi said he goes to the Capitol two to three times each year to meet with lawmaker on labor issues. One day early in 2013, he was at the Capitol and noticed AB711 and a couple of other anti-gun bills were being heard that day in the Senate Public Safety Committee. So he went to the hearing and sat in the front row. Gagliardi said Democrats on the committee he helped get elected acted uncomfortable seeing him sitting there. Several asked him what he was doing at the Public Safety Committee hearing, and suggested he was out of his element.
While Gagliardi is a labor leader, that reaction promoted him to put together a large coalition of labor leaders to fight AB711. “Unions represent business in America, including the manufacturers of lead ammunition,” Gagliardi said. “We elect these people to go to Sacramento to create jobs, not to make them go away.”
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