One of the biggest progressive policy success stories of the past few decades can be found in California’s gun death statistics. In 1993, Califonia had 17.3 such deaths per 1,000 people compared to a 14.6 rate for the country as a whole, according to CDC data; by 2016, the U.S. rate had dropped to 12.2—but California’s had plummeted to 7.7, a 56% decrease. Though many factors undoubtedly influenced that decline, gun control advocates point to the suite of reforms that made the state one of the most restrictive in the nation when it comes to firearm ownership.
Guns classified as “assault weapons” are banned in California; people who have restraining orders against them must give up their guns, as do people convicted of a variety of crimes; until a court overturned it this summer, there was a statewide ban on magazines that could hold more than 10 bullets. The state is the only one in the country whose gun laws earn an “A” rating from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a 501(c)(3) that has pushed California legislators to adopt its strictest-in-the-nation regulations. (Previously known as the Legal Community Against Violence, the Giffords Center was founded in the wake of a mass shooting at a San Francisco law firm.)
These reforms didn’t happen overnight; even in a state with generally progressive politics, passing such legislation involves a lot of work. Blue Tent spoke to Robyn Thomas, the executive director of the Giffords Center, about how the organization helped usher in California’s tough gun laws.
They had funding and partners
Change isn’t possible without organizational infrastructure, and that costs money to erect. A key funder of gun control advocacy was the California Wellness Foundation, which, under its former President and CEO Gary Yates, made gun violence a priority and invested “tens of millions of dollars over 20 years,” Thomas said. That money went toward not just groups working on policy changes like Giffords, but also groups like Youth ALIVE!, an Oakland-based organization that stages interventions on streets and at the hospital bedsides of young people wounded by gun violence.
Importantly, these organizations got together multiple times a year as part of the California Firearm Strategy Group, a project of the California Wellness Foundation, to make sure they were on the same page in terms of messaging and legislative priorities.
“I consider them to be a great funder,” Thomas said of the foundation. “They're not interventionist. They don't put themselves in the mix. But they are really clear about their priorities as a funder of collaboration and coordination and having grantees work together and convene.”
They started at the local level
California has a relaxed preemption statute, meaning that local governments can pass gun control laws. This isn’t common: Except for a handful of blue states, most U.S. states have laws that prohibit towns from regulating firearms. But in California, advocates didn’t need to win battles in the state capitol; they could begin by getting more liberal areas to pass restrictions.
The Legal Community Against Violence did this in 1996 when it campaigned to ban “junk guns,” also known as “Saturday night specials,” small, cheap handguns often used in gun crimes. West Hollywood was the first jurisdiction to prohibit them in January of that year, and 28 others followed. Later that year, a state court ruled that this sort of law was constitutionally valid, and dozens of additional jurisdictions adopted such bans in the next few years. In 1999, California lawmakers passed the Unsafe Handgun Act, which mandated safety requirements for guns; the law came into force the following year. Since then, the number of unintentional shootings—which can occur more often with badly made junk guns—dropped by two-thirds, according to the Giffords Center.
Other policies also began at the local level. In recent years, California gun control advocates have focused on regulating bullets, an effort that has roots in a Sacramento regulation requiring ammunition purchases to be recorded. That has helped police find criminals who have used specific types of ammunition, and its success convinced state legislators to pass a law mandating background checks for all bullet purchases.
Passing gun control at the local level is good in and of itself, but if a law seems to reduce gun violence in an individual town, it can be used as evidence when talking to state legislators or judges, Thomas said. Restrictions on gun ownership are always going to be contentious and challenged in court, but the ability to point to evidence that they work can be extremely important.
They fight it out in the legislature and the courts
Restrictions on guns and ammunition have to be crafted extremely carefully. On one hand, you want to avoid creating loopholes that are easy to exploit; on the other, the Second Amendment limits your ability to restrict access to guns. “Particularly at the state level, when we draft legislation, there is a reason why we draft it the way we do,” said Thomas. “Everything in it is done in such a way as to reduce the loopholes, to reduce confusion, to make sure this legislation can have the maximum impact, to ensure that it complies with the Second Amendment.”
The problem the Giffords Center faces during the legislative process is that individual lawmakers may not be aware of all the complexities of gun control; meanwhile, the gun lobby will advocate for changes to weaken the legislation, and sometimes, legislators don’t know exactly how those changes might affect a bill. “Time and time again, we’ve seen really good legislation weakened to the point of almost being useless in that process,” Thomas said.
The final stage of gun control legislation isn’t signing the bill into law, but defending it in court against pro-gun groups. Advocates in California have endured some defeats this year, including rulings that blocked a requirement that ammunition purchasers submit to background checks and the striking down of the ban on high-capacity magazines. Even gun control experts can’t always predict how judges will rule. Making change is hard, on gun control as on so much else.
“People think that in California, that we could just do whatever we wanted, that anything we want to get passed here we get passed,” Thomas said. "First of all, that’s not the case now, and it certainly was 100% not the case 26 years ago. Gun policy, no matter how progressive the state politics, has always been challenging.”
Photo credit: Karin Hildebrand Lau / Shutterstock.com
