California governor Gavin Newsom signed an extensive slate of gun-control bills on Tuesday aimed at imposing stricter penalties on people whose firearms are accessed by minors and bolstering the state’s red-flag laws which allow law enforcement to temporarily seize weapons from people deemed dangerous, among other measures.
California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the U.S., even without the legislative package of 24 new bills signed into law. Gun-rights supporters opposed some of the new measures.
The package includes measures strengthening storage requirements for gun owners to keep firearms away from children, providing comprehensive school-safety plans during an active-shooter threat, and preventing what Newsom’s office considers gun-related hate crimes, according to the Associated Press.
Other measures are aimed at protecting victims from domestic violence, allowing a state court to consider stalking and animal cruelty as grounds for removing firearms, and banning the mentally ill from possessing ammunition if they are already subject to a firearms prohibition.
One of the bills requires so-called “ghost guns” marked for disposal to be destroyed in their “entirety by smelting, shredding, crushing, or cutting all parts of the firearm, including any attachments.” Ghost guns are homemade firearms without a serial number, which makes them untraceable.
“California won’t wait until the next school shooting or mass shooting to act,” Newsom said in a statement. “In the absence of congressional action, our state is once again leading the way by strengthening our nation-leading gun laws.”
As governor since 2019, Newsom has made it his mission to combat gun violence in California. Last year, he signed bills that ban people from carrying firearms in most public places and double the taxes on guns and ammunition to help pay for school safety.
Newsom also launched a campaign last year calling for a constitutional amendment to enshrine gun restrictions nationwide as a way to reduce gun violence without changing the Second Amendment. The proposal has not gained much traction.
Newsom touted the latest gun-control package as a “bipartisan” effort, though both chambers of the state legislature remain overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.
“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,” Newsom said.
California had a 43 percent lower gun death rate and 33 percent lower gun homicide rate than the rest of the U.S. in 2022, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data analyzed by the California Department 0f Justice’s Office of Gun Violence and Prevention. California’s youth gun homicide rate that year was nearly 50 percent lower than it was in 2006. For comparison, the youth homicide rates in Florida and Texas rose 24 percent and 49 percent, respectively, over the same period.
Also in 2022, the state’s firearm homicide rate per capita for youth under 25 was 45 percent below the rate recorded for the rest of the U.S. Texas and Florida, two of the country’s most populous states, both had nearly double the youth gun homicide rate of that in California.