By SDCN Editor
Sacramento, CA–Governor Gavin Newsom Tuesday signed a bipartisan legislative package to further reinforce California’s nation-leading gun laws and prevent traumatic incidents of mass violence.
The Strong Gun Safety Laws build on the state’s strategies to address gun violence, including new measures to reduce domestic violence.
The new laws will strengthen safe storage requirements and create stricter penalties for gun owners whose guns are accessed by a child, resulting in death or injury to themselves or others. Strengthens safety measures to protect students during active threats.
To prevent gun-related hate crimes, the state will provide additional training for law enforcement officers and courts to assess and identify extremism and potential for hate-based crimes, allowing more effective use of restraining orders.
To protect victims of domestic abuse, the state will create training and tools for child custody caseworkers and law enforcement officers to determine whether abusers may have access to guns.
Animal abusers and persons found incompetent to stand trial will be restricted in possessing firearms. These new restrictions will strengthen California’s red flag law.
California courts will receive increased information to ensure that people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others no longer have access to firearms.
The Golden State is ranked number 1 for gun safety and last year experienced a gun death rate 43 percent lower than the national average. In comparison, Texas and Florida, which ranked 31st and 24th respectively in gun law strength, had firearm mortality rates more than 1.5 times that of California. Since the early 1990s, the state has cut its gun death rate in half. By 2022, it had the 7th lowest gun death rate in the country.
‘If other states’ gun death mortality rates matched California’s, an estimated 140,000 Americans would still be alive today,” said in a partial news release.
Nationwide, firearms kill more children and adolescents than any other cause. Compared to the rest of the nation, California has made substantial long-term progress in reducing per capita rates of youth firearm homicide.
Preliminary CDC data showed that in 2022, California’s age-adjusted per capita firearm homicide rate for youth under 25 was 45% below the rate recorded for the rest of the U.S. By contrast, the rest of the U.S. experienced a 37% increase in youth gun homicide rates over the same period. The next two most populous states after California – Florida and Texas – experienced substantial increases over this same period, with youth homicide rates rising by 24% in Florida and 49% in Texas.
