They can pass their bills, but there has to be a final version that goes to the Governator for his signature. Is there any word about Ahhnold's stance on this joke?
CA is still in a financial mess. The burden of starting up and maintaining this system will have to be borne by the state. The whole program, regardless if there is a pre-numbered bullet or a gun that stamps something on a round is going to cost millions of dollars to get running. Every place in the state that sells ammo (assuming that the internet ammo suppliers turn their backs on CA as they should to fight this BS) will have to submit data to some state office where it will be entered into some sort of system.
My years of experience in state government and the IT world is that when a new system is needed, computer equipment is purchased, a variety of software is loaded, programmers and developers are hired to build the custom application and then other programmers do the maintenance. Data entry staff hae to keep up with the incoming data. All of this will cost money. State offices that already have large computer resources (hardware and software) are usually very relictant to share their computers and staff unless they get a lot of money for doing somebody else's work.
And if a pre-numbered bullet system is used, who gets to inform the state that bullet #105,035,602,596,001 was fired at a target last Tuesday at the local range? And who deletes the info from the data base. Databases are funny things, they need maintenance and you cannot really have an open-ended file in them. It takes lots of work to allow things like serial numbers to expand in terms of how many digits in a serial number and the other data that is related to the bullet number, like seller, buyer, store and city where it was sold.
Even if you remove the argument and implications of "Big Brother", another step in trying to take away the rights of the citizen, much less the issue of RKBA, this thing is going to backfire big time in somebody's face. From the standpoint of time, money and resources, this is just not going to work. To me, the bills were introduced more from an emotional anti-gun point of view on the part of the legislators compared to anything that could remotely help in solving of a crime.
Another sad thing about this whole deal is that ammo makers may not want to stand up to CA and refuse to do something like pre-number a bullet. They want to sell their product and make money. I just don't see Remington, Winchester, CCI and other makers telling CA to stuff their law where the sun doesn't shine. And even if this thing does go into law, the ammo makers will probably continue to sell to LEO organizations. If the current bills do not have anything that exempts police agencies, the final versions probably will have some such thing.