California’s progressive led state government takes great pride in its “A” grade and 1st place amongst all states for what the Giffords Law Center calls its “Gun Law Strength” ranking. In September 2024 Gov. Newsom said:
California won’t wait until the next school shooting or mass shooting to act. In the absence of congressional action, our state is once again leading the way by strengthening our nation-leading gun laws. Data shows that California’s gun safety laws are effective in preventing gun-related deaths — which makes the ongoing inaction and obstruction by politicians in the pocket of the gun lobby even more reprehensible.
California also scores 44th in gun deaths, with 8 deaths per 100,000 population – a level they state is 42 percent below the national average. Giffords makes note of California’s safe storage law, gun relinquishment procedures, and its new Office of Gun Violence Prevention (more on those later).
The source for Giffords data is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which tracks gun deaths of all types around the country. The CDC reported just over 48,000-gun deaths in 2022, the last full year of statistics. Of those, 54 percent were suicides, 43 percent were homicides, and 3 percent were accidents.
In 2023, murders did indeed decline in California to 1,892 deaths from 2,206 in 2022. Despite an overall increase in violent crime of 3.3 percent. Yet the percentage of murders committed by firearms (handguns are overwhelmingly a murderer’s weapon of choice) has remained remarkably consistent, remaining relatively flat from 70 percent in 2014 to 71.9 percent in 2023.
What hasn’t remained consistent are the number of assaults with a deadly weapon by the use of a firearm, which exploded from 17,908 incidents in 2018 to 29,179 in 2023 – an increase of a shocking 62 percent. They are California’s murder victims who didn’t die and Giffords doesn’t count them.
A number of possible explanations for this disparity exist but the life-saving efforts of the Emergency Medical System (EMS) system and well-trained hospital trauma teams deserve much of the credit. 72 percent of patients who arrive in hospital emergency departments with firearms injuries will survive and 48 percent of those are homicide/assault victims.
Still, why is it that a state with an A grade and number one ranking has a 62 percent increase in firearms assaults? The answer lies in the collision between progressive crime policy and deaths tracked by Giffords.
In 2023, arrests for violent crimes based on racial/ethnic group were 22 percent black, 24 percent white, and 45 percent Hispanic and the total number of people reporting they are white or Hispanic is 70 percent while only 6.6 percent identify as black.
The progressive solution to correct this disparity has been decriminalization and sentencing reform, even for violent crimes. A perverse sort of justice where gun crimes are redefined to correct racial disparities while ignoring the effect on victims.
The effect on shooting victims should not be surprising. The California Firearms Injury Dashboard indicates 22.4 percent of firearms injury victims are white, 41.9 percent are Hispanic, and 25.8 percent are black. The dashboard does not track survival rates by race.
SB 620, enacted in 2017, prohibits the imposition of a firearms enhancement if the defendant was also charged with a gang enhancement. This is because charging someone for participating in a crime while a member of a criminal street gang while armed would somehow be a racist act given that all criminal gangs are racially exclusive organizations.
SB 620 also decreased the sentencing enhancement for the possession, use, or causing injury from 10-20-25 year additional sentences respectively, to 3-4-10 years with longer terms for certain underlying felonies. It also allows a court, “in the interest of justice and at the time of sentencing or resentencing, to strike or dismiss an enhancement otherwise required to be imposed by the above provisions of law.” This is something many judges in California do with regularity.
Not to be outdone, California’s most progressive District Attorneys (all now removed from office) Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Pamela Price in Alameda County, and George Gascón in Los Angeles, had adopted policies prohibiting the use of firearms and gang sentencing enhancements.
This brings us to California’s “gun relinquishment law” which is tracked through the Armed and Prohibited Persons System or APPS. Felons , those with certain probation terms, those subject to restraining orders involving the threat of violence, and those involved in mental health events are prohibited from owning or possessing firearms.
The APPS database currently lists 23,451 armed and prohibited persons, 50 percent of whom are felons and another 20 percent have been involved in mental health triggering events. In 2023, the state attorney general’s office investigated 8,500 APPS individuals and seized 1,443 firearms. In all, they successfully removed 9,051 individuals from the backlog. Unfortunately, at the same time, another 8,633 were added for a net reduction of just 418. Incredibly, in some cases prohibited individuals were found to have surreptitiously acquired more weapons since being placed on the list.
At its current rate of case-resolution, it will take the understaffed investigators at the Department of Justice decades to reduce the backlog and account for the number of firearms in the hands of prohibited persons.
Conversely, California’s law-abiding citizens comply with a list of firearms and ammunition purchase and transfer laws too long to list here including an 11 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition purchases whose proceeds are intended to fund “violence prevention efforts”. Efforts that have clearly been ignored by California’s criminals who in 2023 shot or killed 31,071 victims. To use Governor Newsom’s own words, that’s a reprehensible level of violence.
In the face of all that California Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur has proposed Assembly Bill 1333 which would redefine justifiable homicide to require a duty to retreat when faced with an assailant in possession of a deadly weapon, prohibits shooting in defense of another, or to protect one’s own home. Zbur says this is to reduce “vigilantism”. In practice it will give armed criminals a legal and tactical advantage over peace officers and law-abiding citizens protecting their homes, their families, and each other.
For all of that California deserves an F.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
