Sacramento.- California bans firearms for domestic violence offenders. It prohibits them from people who are considered a danger to others or to themselves. There is a ban on high-capacity magazines and a ban on noise-dampening silencers. Semi-automatic weapons of the type known colloquially as “assault weapons” are, as is well known, prohibited.
More than 100 gun laws, more than any state, are on the books in California. They have saved lives, lawmakers say: Californians have one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the United States.
Yet this month, those laws failed to stop the massacres of at least 19 people in back-to-back mass shootings. The tragedies in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay have confounded Americans who consider California the best bastion of gun safety in a nation awash in firearms.
Inside the state, gun rights advocates say the shootings show California’s strategy is a failure. Meanwhile, gun safety groups have already begun mobilizing for more laws and better enforcement. As details emerge in the investigations, numerous shortcomings have been highlighted, even with California’s voluminous law.
For example, the state’s regulatory web does not necessarily force gun owners to give up guns that were once legal to purchase but are now prohibited. California cannot take guns away from people who may have engaged in dangerous behavior, but are not properly flagged by courts or law enforcement. And the state must contend with the illegal gun trade, a river of unregistered “ghost” guns and the flow of firearms from neighboring less-regulated states.
More generally, though, the shootings are offering a lesson in the limits of state power to stop American gun violence, even with the political will at all levels of state government to do so. Recent US Supreme Court decisions have challenged key California laws, and the most recent shootings have highlighted the difficulty of using state law to balance security and liberty.
The shooting in Monterey Park, in southern California, left 11 dead and eight wounded at a ballroom dance studio. Police said the suspect, Huu Can Tran, 72, opened fire at a Lunar New Year party and then killed himself as officers approached the van in which he had fled.
Two days later, sheriff’s deputies in Half Moon Bay arrested Zhao Chunli, 66, hours after a violent shooting at his workplace at two plant nurseries.
