California appeared to be firing blanks this week as its new law mandating background checks for anyone buying ammunition suffered glitches and delays.

“I’ve had one customer, and I had to turn them away because I couldn’t get into the system,” Don Reed, owner of DGS Ammo & Airguns in Sacramento, said Monday, according to ABC News.

“He seemed a little bit perturbed. … There’s a lot of people feel like they’re being held hostage suddenly — punishing the people who’ve been doing it the right way,” Reed added.

Reed was not alone.

“So far it doesn’t work at all. My system doesn’t let me access it,” Steve Converse, a clerk at Ade’s Gun Shop in Orange, said.

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Scott Emmett, the manager of the Ammo Bros store in San Diego, said the system wrongly consumes time and resources.

“I sat on the phone for about 40 minutes and no one answered” at the state Department of Justice, which handles the new law, he said.

“I can’t believe the amount of paper it wastes. This one transaction for two types of ammo was almost eight pages long.”

One business owner said the state did not roll out the new law well at all.

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“I have thousands of items that I’m going to have to manually type into the system,” Scott Dipman, vice president at Coyote Point Armory in Burlingame, explained.

“There’s a learning curve for us to figure out what that the new procedure is, and unfortunately the state didn’t give us any peek into what was going on,” he said.

Many gun owners planned ahead.

Danielle Rudolph, sales director at Poway Weapons and Gear Range near San Diego, said the range sold 4.6 million rounds of ammunition in June, far higher than 220,000 rounds sold in June 2018, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The range advertised an “ammunition last day of freedom,” she said.

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“We had a huge surge in ammo sales,” Rudolph said, noting that, although the range was doing good business in guns, “before yesterday it was really ammunition-focused.”

Under the new law, ammunition buyers not in the state database have to pay $19 to be registered. After that, every ammo purchase will cost them an extra $1 for the background check.

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