Between the Legislature and Gavin Newsom, California — the state that already has the nation’s strictest gun control laws — will have more of the same. And the results will be nothing.

Gun control is one of the most ridiculously over-studied topics in criminology. The Bureau of Justice Statistics lists thousands of studies, reports and raw data tables concerning “firearm violence.”

Google Scholar retrieves a nearly unmeasurable number of peer reviewed papers. Add to this all the books published by criminologists and economists on the topic, many of which cover every angle of the field. As a science, we know much about criminals, lunatics, violence and how guns fit into the picture.

This is why the raft of legislation before the voters and the governor should be rejected. Empirical data shows it will be worthless and likely will not save a single life.

Most popular among its advocates is the banning of ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Indeed, one editorial claimed that: “There’s no reason that hunters or sport shooters need weapons made to rapidly kill large numbers of people.”

This misses three salient points. The first is that the largest cluster of gun homicides are street crimes and gang members don’t use extra capacity magazines (in fact, in most street-level exchanges, each shooter fires fewer than three rounds). Second, there are numerous sporting purposes for these magazines, from three-gun matches to wild boar hunting (chasing a boar through the brush is aided without having to reload on the run).

Foremost though is defense in lawless situations, such as when Korean shop owners held in check raging mobs during the Rodney King riots using “assault weapons” with extra capacity magazines.

Other champions of the proposed legislation site ammunition sales regulations as beneficial. But the same laws apply to strawman sales for firearms, which are more traceable than spent rounds of ammo.

Despite being more traceable, strawman acquisition of guns continue as will strawman ammo sales. Add to this the ease of home manufacture of ammunition (a hobby among sports shooters) and the problem of street violence will not be abated at all.

Changing a culture of violence does not begin with weapons and it certainly does not begin with wholesale suppression of civil rights.

It begins with understanding the source of violence and treating the disease, not the symptoms — were guns a source of violence, then nobody would walk out of a gun show alive.

Instead, violence is seeded within subcultures. In America, it is uniquely tied to inner-city cultures that support and even praise violence as a means to petty ends. Changing violent cultures has to be an evolution and no legislation will cause this to happen.

What legislation can do is contain violent people. In 1993, California had a homicide rate 40 percent above national average. By passing a 10-20-Life law that specifically addressed criminal gun use, and by putting away other types of violent felons via the Three Strikes Law, California’s violence problem fell to national levels (even as national homicide rates dropped). Targeting violent offenders and not your neighbor’s rights is the proper approach and the one already proven to work.

Guy Smith is the founder and lead researcher of the Gun Facts Project at www.GunFacts.info.