Lockyer likened the proposal to previous legislation that advanced law enforcement investigation efforts, such as funding for DNA labs.

"We're going to solve (more) crimes if this bill becomes law," Attorney General Bill Lockyer testified.

The proposal would provide investigators with a huge leap forward in their efforts to trace ammunition at a crime scene to the person who fired it. Though ballistics testing enables police to connect a bullet to the gun that fired it, its use in investigations is limited because investigators need to recover both the gun and the bullet to confirm a match.

While bullets used in a crime may have been lost or stolen from their original purchaser, knowing who that person is will provide a starting point for investigators that they previously have not had, supporters say. Randy Rossi, the director of the firearms division at the state Department of Justice, likened it to "a license plate falling off a car when driven from a crime scene."

Noting that California homicides increased to 2,400 last year from 2,000 the year before -- with 45 percent unsolved -- law enforcement officials urged senators on the committee to vote for the bill. Nearly three-quarters of the state's homicides in 2003 were committed with a firearm.

Five months after the election of George W. Bush on Nov. 2, 2004, something still doesn’t add up.

Although the election results have been accepted by the majority of the country, a nonpartisan group of university-affiliated statisticians and other experts found that something may have gone very, very wrong—so wrong that the wrong man may be sitting in the White House.

This group, USCountVotes, looked at the exit poll results taken throughout Election Day by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. The exit polls indicated that Democratic nominee John Kerry would win by 3% of the popular vote. Nevertheless, George W. Bush officially won the national popular vote by 2.5%. This type of discrepancy is the largest to ever occur in a presidential election. Exit polls are conducted with those who have just voted—they are not a sampling of “probable” or “eligible” voters before the election.

How much, if at all, was newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst to blame for the shocking fate that overtook the brilliant young Hollywood actress Dorothy Comingore?

You have to wonder—five years out, will any expression that a right-wing administration and its blogosphere enforcers object to be considered acceptable?

That's what Connie Davie of Creve Coeur thought when she saw dogs tied outside, all alone, day and night, in every kind of weather. In fact, she thought, as images of the lonely, pathetic-looking canines kept creeping into her mind, surely there is a law against such obvious abuse.

Curious, Davie called her local police department to find out just what the law said.

It said nothing. There was no law. As long as a dog has access to food, water and shelter, the law was happy.

Or volunteering for Stray Rescue of St. Louis. Or walking Eddie and Sherry, the dogs she fostered for Stray Rescue and ended up keeping.

But, she said, "I saw a need in my area for a law that addressed this issue of tethering." Animals were suffering.

And when animals are suffering, Davie acts.

"I worked with Beth for three to four months drafting an ordinance that we thought would be enforceable. I also worked with our police chief, Don Kayser, since he would be the one who'd have to enforce whatever we came up with," she said.

"When I first met with the police chief, I told him I didn't expect the police to be cruising around looking for chained dogs. And I told the city council that I didn't expect the police to be the dog gestapo. But if someone calls to report that a dog is being mistreated, the police need to have the leverage to act on it."

Davie smiled when she recalled that the final draft of the ordinance had a mistake in it. "It said that a dog could not be tied out continuously for more than six hours. It was supposed to say eight hours, because we wanted to take people who work into consideration. When one of the council members pointed out the typo, another council member said they'd be happy if it said we couldn't chain a dog outside at all," she said.

Davie still is amazed at the relative ease with which the ordinance passed. So much so that she has decided to broaden the battlefield.

She wants to get a similar measure enacted in St. Louis County.

Davie is hoping that others will join her crusade, not just in St. Louis County but in other municipalities.

"What we did in Creve Coeur has been done in at least 59 other communities across the country," she said. "It's becoming kind of a movement, I think."