In California, gun violence is not inevitable

When a new massacre mourned America at the end of May in Uvalde, Texas, Lance Dominguez, a tax expert in California, was particularly shaken. It was just one more killing, still terrible. But seeing on television parents anxiously awaiting news of their children, parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he imagined himself in their place. He is just 40 years old and has three children. He decided to act. He contacted March for Our Lives, the organization created by survivors of the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida.

A few weeks later, on June 11, Lance led the first March for Our Lives march in Manhattan Beach. Talk to local authorities? Raise funds ? Speak from a podium? He had never done that. But he learned quickly. The demonstration brought together several hundred people. «It was important for me, for my children, explains Lance Dominguez. It is not because in California we are better protected that nothing should be done.»

Mortality by firearms well below the national average

Because in terms of gun violence, California is a good student in the United States. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal health agency, the west coast state has one of the lowest death rates in the country: 8.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020, i.e. 44th place (out of 50). That’s significantly less than Mississippi (28) or Louisiana (26), and well below the national average (13).

California (39 million inhabitants, more than 420,000 km2) will never be Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Turbulent, feverish, overheated, it is not a haven of peace. It even suffers a mass killing every … eight days, according to the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), an independent research center. In April, a shooting killed six people in Sacramento, the capital. Each year, about fifty Californians collapse, victims of a weapon discharged at random in the crowd. It’s too much, but it’s less than elsewhere in the country: «1.4 per million population, compared to a national average of 1.9»according to PPIC.

However, it has not always been so in California. The west coast certainly still breathes the scent of flower power, but it is not indifferent to the mythology of the West, to the legend of the Winchester. The state has a large rural section where you don’t shy away from drawing, whether it’s hunting or shooting cans. Isn’t Orange County Airport, south of Los Angeles, named after Hollywood gunslinger John Wayne?

A dramatic improvement since the mid-1990s

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, California was well above the national average for gun deaths, recalls Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, near Sacramento. In 1993, there were 17.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 14.7 in the rest of the country. Since then, gun mortality has dropped a little in the United States… but it has collapsed in California! »

At the origin of this evolution, a shooting in a school in Stockton, in 1989, one of the first of this type, blind, without reason. It killed five people, aged 6 to 9, and around thirty injured. Less than a year later, a law comes into force banning assault rifles, the type of weapon used by the killer. It is still current.

At CAP Tactical Firearms, an armory in Los Angeles, impressive weapons are well on sale, similar, for the layman, to the one that hit Uvalde. «But in California they’re different», explains one of the two sellers. He indicates the magazine, limited to ten bullets. Several other characteristics imposed by Sacramento limit the harmful capacity of these weapons of war.

No Assault Rifles in California

In California, not only the trade in assault rifles is prohibited, but also their possession. This is of course a bit of an illusion: the state has borders with the more lax Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. So you can take your car, cross the desert and come home with bigger guns. It’s illegal, but not impossible. «The laws should not be analyzed separately, esteem Garen Wintemute. None provide a miracle solution. But all of them taken together… work!»

Among the other elements of the regulations (verification of the buyer’s psychiatric precedents, no sale for those under 21, etc.), two are very important. The first is simple – anyone wishing to acquire a firearm must wait ten days before acquiring it, to avoid buying and acting out in anger.

The “red flag” law, a success

The second is more complex, but has the wind in its sails: the law red flag (red flag). California was one of the first states to adopt this device, in 2016. It allows relatives, teachers or colleagues to report a person with a troubled attitude, likely to represent a danger to themselves or their environment. A judge can then order the confiscation, for a specified time, of the weapons of the individual, the time to solve the problem.

This type of law, in force, in different versions, in 19 states, is all the more useful since in many cases, the perpetrators of shootings brag about their intentions on social networks before striking. According to a study by the Violence Prevention Research Program, this law made it possible, during the first three years of its implementation in the Golden State, to disarm 58 people on time. In 12 of these cases, a school was targeted.

“California is not the most restrictive state. Especially for the possession of handguns, says Franklin Zimring, professor of law at the University of Berkeley and specialist in violence and crime. But it is a well-organized state. So if she wants to put something in place, she does it well. Difficult to pass between the drops.»

In the never-ending gun debate, the great West Coast state wants to set itself up as a role model. Its Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who has national ambitions, opposes it to the pro-gun lobby, which repeatedly repeats that «it’s not the guns that kill, but the men», and that tightening the law does not solve anything. For now, however, his arguments are not enough to convince Congress in Washington to follow Sacramento’s lead.

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Assault rifles have made over a billion dollars in ten years

The top five US arms manufacturers made over a billion dollars in ten years selling assault rifles.

The main manufacturer of AR-15, Ruger, doubled its profits between 2020 and 2021.

Representatives room must vote in the coming days to ban assault rifles. Barring a huge surprise, the law will then fail in the Senate, where the support of ten Republicans would be needed.

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