It is hard not to feel hopeless about the political system after 19 elementary school students and two teachers were slaughtered last week in a Texas school, 10 days after 10 people were killed in Buffalo, N.Y. Nationally, our leaders haven’t done anything substantive about gun safety in nearly three decades — mostly because Republicans are largely unwilling to offend the powerful gun lobby and its supporters.
Yet there is a reason to feel some hope. To do so, however, will require the ultimate test in your faith in how California influences the rest of the nation. It will require you to believe in the influence of the place that showed America a different way to think about same-sex marriage, that birthed the power of technology and that has long been the incubator of political and social change.
Now, comes perhaps an even greater challenge: Can California change America’s toxic relationship with guns?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom believes so. He is inviting the nation to follow what he likes to refer to as “the nation-state” of California, the world’s fifth-largest economy.
“For so many of us that are feeling deep anxiety and fear, I hope you look to this state for leadership for demonstrable results,” Newsom said after the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. “California leads this national conversation. When California moves, other states move in the same direction.”
If you’re dubious, ask Garen Wintemute. He’s the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, and a leading national researcher on the impact of gun violence.
Despite being immersed daily in that horror, Wintemute remains hopeful, both in the power of humanity and in California’s ability to lead.
“Me, the hopeful person, says we can’t give up,” Wintemute told me last week. “We cannot let go of the belief in the possibility of the species to change for the better.”
And “California is democracy’s leading laboratory on firearm violence and firearm policy,” Wintemute said “We try things here. And if they work, other places pick them up.”
Here are some reasons to cling to a glimmer of hope.
California has led before: The modern gun safety movement began in California in 1967, led by GOP icon Gov. Ronald Reagan. What inspired this, as Newsom pointed out, was “a perverse series of reasons.” Namely, that Reagan and others were terrified that year when members of the Black Panthers stood on the steps of the state Capitol legally holding shotguns, pistols and .357 Magnums.
Co-founder Bobby Seale said Black people “have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America” to right the wrongs of the past. “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”
Adam Winkler, author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms” said the gun law California passed was among several designed “to target African Americans.” The law that Reagan signed — with the National Rifle Association’s backing — banned Californians from openly carrying weapons.
Reagan wasn’t California’s only Republican governor to enact change.
In 1989 a gunman carrying two pistols and an AK-47 killed five children and injured 29 other kids and a teacher at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton. Later that year, Republican Gov. George Deukmejian signed the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act, which banned magazines with a capacity of over 10 rounds and classified dozens of guns as assault weapons.
In 1994, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, led the charge to pass a federal ban on assault weapons after a gunman killed eight during a rampage at a high-rise office building at 101 California St. in San Francisco. Since then, studies on the effectiveness of that law have suggested “the 1994 law was effective in reducing mass-shooting deaths,” according to the Washington Post Fact Checker. The federal law, however, expired a decade later and hasn’t been renewed.
Some reforms are working: Gun safety organizations regularly tout California as having the strongest gun laws in the nation — thanks to laws that passed in the 1990s “that make it harder for people who are a danger to themselves and others to acquire dangerous firearms,” according to Brady United Against Gun Violence.
In 1993, California’s firearm mortality rate was 17.5 per 100,000 residents — higher than the national average of 14.7. But from then until 2017, California’s firearm mortality rate declined by 55% — almost four times the decrease in the rest of the nation, according to Brady.
In 2021, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranked California as having the strongest gun safety laws in the nation and a gun death rate of 8.5 per 100,000 residents — that’s far lower than Texas, which earned an “F” grade from the organization and had 14.2 deaths per 100,000.
Some California policies have the potential to influence more states, Wintemute said, like its assault weapons ban (currently in place in seven states). Or its ban on owning, purchasing or possessing firearms for 10 years if you’ve been convicted of a violent misdemeanor. Two other states have similar laws. California was among the first states to adopt a red flag law, which enables a family member, co-worker, school employee or law enforcement to ask a court to seize a firearm from someone determined to be a danger to themselves or others. Now, 19 states do. (A 2021 Chronicle investigation showed that application of the law varies wildly by jurisdiction.)
Since the state has so many gun laws, part of the challenge faced by gun researchers is that it is often hard to determine which of them is directly responsible for lowering firearm-related deaths, Wintemute said. (His team is currently studying the effectiveness of California’s laws as a collective “bundle.”)
Yes, mass shootings happen here — from San Bernardino to Gilroy. And yes, California gun laws often can’t do much to stop someone who legally bought a firearm in another state.
But a powerful effect of California’s pack of gun laws, Wintemute said, is that they set “bars to the purchase of firearms that don’t exist in others states.” That’s a deterrent.
And they’re popular: 63% of likely voters say laws covering the sales of guns should be more strict, according to a 2021 survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
Willingness to experiment: Newsom said last week that he is ready to sign a dozen new gun control measures currently moving through the Legislature. Among the most experimental — at least from a legal perspective — is a measure that would enable citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells an assault rifle or untraceable ghost gun in California.
It is purposely modeled after a law passed in Texas last year that that bans most abortions after six weeks and enables private individuals to sue clinics and providers. Newsom’s gambit is, as he put it last week, that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have “a hell of a time taking this law and not applying their same principle point of view that they applied on the Texas abortion law.”
Being on the leading edge of gun safety laws comes with legal risk, especially when they come before conservative courts. Earlier this month, a pair of federal appeals court judges appointed by Donald Trump overturned California’s ban on selling semiautomatic rifles to anyone under 21, saying it violated the constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense.
In the next few weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to strike down a New York law requiring a law enforcement permit to carry a concealed handgun in public. That would affect a similar law in California. Advocates worry that other gun laws could be at risk in the courts, too, including the state’s bans on large-capacity magazines and minimum age requirements to buy or possess guns.
But advocates say a fear of setbacks isn’t a reason to quit pushing the envelope. And perhaps no advocate can speak with more authority than the namesake of the Giffords gun safety organization, former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. In 2011, Giffords was shot in the head while she was meeting with constituents near Tucson.
After that, she spent years learning to walk, talk, ride her bike, play the French horn and work her way back to a normal life, she told people this month during an online event held by Manny’s, a Mission District community gathering center. She urged the activists there not to get discouraged, even in the face of last week’s horror.
“It can be so difficult,” Giffords said. “Losses hurt. Setbacks are hard. My own recovery has taken me years. … A better world is possible. But change doesn’t happen overnight.”
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
