The power – and limits – of California’s gun laws
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, California has experienced three mass killings in the past 10 days. Today, we examine what any state could do to stop these tragedies in a country awash in guns.
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California has a reputation as a tough place to buy a gun. The state’s patchwork of gun laws has been judged the strongest in the nation by one gun-control advocacy group.
But recent mass killings in the state, including in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, illustrate how the state’s strict gun laws are are limited by a broader reality in which gun ownership is widely considered a constitutionally protected right, firearms move freely between states with vastly different regulations and gun-control measures are dotted with exceptions.
There have already been 39 mass shootings in 2023 in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Mass shootings — in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed — have already averaged more than one per day this year. Gun violence remains significantly less common in California than in most other states, which advocates credit to the laws on the books.
Today, the Post’s West Coast correspondent Reis Thebualt joins us to examine the impact of California’s gun laws and ask what any state could do to stop these tragedies in a country awash in guns.
Transcript
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| 0:18.6 | It was Saturday night when the Lunar New Year festival ended in Monterrey Park, California. It's a small city of about 60,000 people just east of Los Angeles. |
| 0:28.1 | And people there were really looking forward to this year's celebration. |
| 0:32.6 | The Lunar New Year festival is the biggest event on Monterrey Park's calendar every year. And this was the first time it happened since the pandemic. |
| 0:42.8 | Reese Teebo is the post's West Coast correspondent. |
| 0:46.1 | It was just this joyous celebration for a city that is two thirds Asian American. |
| 0:52.1 | And a couple hours later, a gunman walked into a dance studio, not far from where the festivities were happening. |
| 1:03.5 | And he killed 11 people and wounded 10 more. |
| 1:07.5 | We returned to our top story now out of Monterrey Park, California. At least 11 people died in a mass shooting during what should have been a joyous holiday weekend. |
| 1:17.0 | So I woke up on Sunday morning and went straight to Monterrey Park to talk to residents and talk to the community's leaders about what had just happened. |
| 1:29.0 | And one of the first people I spoke with was Mayor Henry Lowe. |
| 1:34.4 | In the Lunar New Year represents renewal. And also it's the other rabbit, which represents hope and peace. |
| 1:41.3 | And I think that we have the community and we need to start a positive healing. |
| 1:49.0 | And that means providing for complemental services, for the victims and our families, finding out how we can support them and their type of need. |
| 1:58.6 | I talked to Mayor Lowe about just how his community has responded to this kind of violence that they had never seen before. |
| 2:07.8 | I mean, it's not far from Los Angeles, which has a much higher crime rate. |
| 2:14.7 | But a lot of people described Monterrey Park as really this safe haven and kind of the last place that they would expect a mass shooting to happen. |
| 2:25.2 | I think he was just trying to process things, just like his neighbors. |
| 2:30.4 | He has spent the last two decades in Monterrey Park. And even when I talked to him, I think he was still in a state of shock like everyone else. |
| 2:47.0 | Monterrey Park wasn't the only recent mass shooting in California. |
| 2:50.8 | Last week, six people were killed in a small town in the Central Valley. |
| 2:55.2 | We're learning gruesome and disturbing new details tonight about a cartel like shooting that killed six people in Goshen. |
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