The Daily - Lessons in Gun Control From California

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

As a proportion of its population, California has one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the United States — 8.5 per 100,000 people, compared with 13.7 nationally.How did the state get that way?Guest: Shawn Hubler, a California correspondent for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Californians are about 25 percent less likely to die in mass shootings, compared with residents of other states, according to a recent study. In a newsletter this week, the Times correspondent Shawn Hubler looked into how and why gun laws there work.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. In the days after the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, Republicans have countered calls for stricter gun laws. Restricting the fundamental human right of law-abiding Americans to defend themselves is not the answer. By saying that there's no evidence that they actually work. People who think that, well, maybe if we just implement tougher gun laws, it's going to solve it. Chicago and L.A. and New York disproved that thesis.

Today, my colleague Sean Hubler talks about how one state's experience seems to suggest otherwise. Governor Abbott just name-checked the state of California. I would caution him from doing that. It's Thursday, June 2nd. June 2nd. So, Sean, gun rights supporters make the case that gun laws don't work. You know, they say that in places where there are lots of gun control laws, there's still lots of mass shootings. So, let's start there.

Is that true? Sure. Demonstrably true, right? There are a lot of gun laws and there are a lot of mass shootings. I'm in California. I've been in California covering news here for 40 years, and I've covered a lot of the mass shootings here. And there are more in California than there are in any other state in the nation. And California also has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation. So yes, those folks are right.

It is true that there are a lot of mass shootings, even though there are a lot of gun laws. Interesting. But it's also wrong to say that gun laws don't prevent mass shootings. But it's also wrong to say that gun laws don't prevent mass shootings. The way to look at it is more along the lines of proportion to the population. California has nearly 40 million people. It has more people than any other state in the nation. It would be strange if it didn't have a lot of mass shootings compared to other states.

It's got more people than other states. But if you look at it the way that researchers, gun violence researchers, look at it on a basis of how many people get killed by guns per 100,000 population? As a proportion of the population. As a proportion of the population. By that measure, California's gun violence rates are really, really low. They're among the lowest in the country. Okay, so tell me about that. California has about eight and a half gun deaths per 100,000 people. That was in 2020.

It's the most recent year for which statistics are available. By comparison, there were about 13.7 gun deaths nationally per 100,000 people. Oh, wow. So you're about 40% less likely to die of firearm violence in California than you are in the rest of the country. So, Sean, how did California get that way? Well, there are a lot of factors, of course, when it comes to gun violence, poverty, joblessness, demographics. But one of the main drivers of California's low gun death rates

are actually gun laws. So let's go back to the beginning. What did California do? California tends to get to places a little sooner than the rest of the country. And California had one of the earliest, most influential gun control laws back in the 60s. In the 60s in the Bay Area, the black activist group, the Black Panthers, was doing armed patrols in Oakland. The police in our community couldn't possibly be there to protect our property because we own no property. They were doing something they called cop watching. They were concerned about racial justice

and police brutality. And the police were there not to promote our welfare or for our security and our safety. And they were keeping their own eyes on the problem. They were patrolling their own neighborhoods. And the legislature in Sacramento was nervous and wanted to put a stop to that.

You have to keep in mind these lawmakers were mostly white. They were having a reaction to black people carrying around loaded guns, doing their own patrols of their own neighborhoods in an area where the police at the time also were mostly white. And so the state legislature decides to look at a law to restrict open carrying in public, which is what the Black Panthers were doing. So on the day of the debate... Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest? You place them under arrest. Take your hands off me if I'm not under arrest.

The Black Panthers showed up to the state capitol for the hearing, and they were carrying guns to show that this was their right to do this. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take full note of the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people. And in fairly short order, this mostly white legislature voted to pass this gun control law that restricted open carrying.

And the governor, who at the time was Ronald Reagan, signed the bill into law. There is absolutely no reason why out on the street today a civilian should be carrying a loaded weapon. So it sounds like racial fears and racism was a major motivator for one of California's early efforts at gun control. You could argue that. This was the 60s, and it prompted a wave of federal legislation at the time, and it also kind of prompted a wave of interest by gun owners

in making sure that their rights were not impaired to carry guns. So in some respects, this was kind of the beginning of the modern gun debate. So, Sean, what happened next? Well, over time, California passed waves of gun legislation. It's usually prompted, as it is in a lot of places, by some big event, some big, scary issue. At Cleveland Elementary today, school began on time, but not as usual. So in the late 1980s, in 1989, there was a shooting at a schoolyard in Stockton. Witnesses say a lone gunman walked onto the campus at Stockton's Cleveland Elementary School and opened fire with a machine gun.

At the time, four to five hundred first, second, and third graders were playing during their lunch period. A guy walked into a schoolyard with an AK-47. When the rampage was over, five students lay dead, a teacher, and more than 30 students were injured, more than half of them critically. At the time, the state legislature acted again. This time they banned assault weapons and that was a pivotal action on the part of California. With that law came a bunch of other laws. The state banned private gun sales. It made sure that gun sales had to be through dealers who in turn had to be licensed. The state started to require background checks and people who were convicted of violent crimes, and this is key, violent misdemeanors like assault and battery, were going to be prohibited from buying guns. And then darkness descends on Los Angeles and the gangs and their guns hit the streets again.

There was a wave of gang crime in California. Shot in the leg, a gang member runs for his life. It was an epidemic. Everyone is saying that this problem is getting out of hand and they're trying to do something about it. It was a terrible problem and it was fueled in part by the availability of cheap handguns. Saturday night specials, you've heard the phrase. But define it for me. They were cheap handguns. They were cheap, easy to use, easily accessible, but they didn't always function the way that they were supposed to.

They broke easily, and the state decided to go after them in a way that was innovative at the time. They went after it by imposing consumer product legislation. They said, okay, if you're going to manufacture cheap handguns, fine, but they have to meet certain specifications. And here's what these specifications are. And they sort of went after them using consumer product law. Yeah, it made a big difference. Much of the Saturday Night Special market was in and around Los Angeles.

The manufacturers were only a handful of companies, and they were mostly around LA. The manufacturers were only a handful of companies, and they were mostly around L.A. And within a fairly short period of time, most of the manufacturers had either moved to Nevada or gone out of business. And they weren't replaced on the market, and it was very expensive to meet these specifications. So, Sean, what was the effect of these laws? I mean, the measurable effect that they had on gun mortality, on gun deaths. So each of these new laws took time to refine and to come online. And so you don't see the effect immediately.

And you don't see one single law having a dramatic effect. But in 1999, California had roughly nine deaths by firearm for every 100,000 people. And the rest of the country had roughly 10 deaths per 100,000 population. It was fairly close. You were about as likely to be killed by a gun in California as you were in the rest of the country in 1999. But over the next 20 years or so, bit by bit, law by law, refinement by refinement, the number of gun deaths begin in California to slope downward. You can trace the line. So that by 2019, California's gun deaths had fallen from 9 per 100,000 to about 7 per 100,000.

Meanwhile, they had gone up in the rest of the country. So there was a huge differential by 2019, before the pandemic started. The chances of dying from gun violence in California were about 50% lower than they were in the rest of the country, even though it's an enormous state. We'll be right back. So, Sean, from what you're saying, it really does seem like each one of these interventions, these gun restrictions, has led to a meaningful decrease in gun deaths. But my question for you is, how do we know that it was the laws themselves that caused it? I mean, as you said earlier, there are lots of factors that contribute to gun violence. Well, California is one of the few states that does its own gun violence research,

and they research the efficacy of these policies that they pass to see kind of what works, what doesn't work, how it works. And so, for example, someone who's done a lot of work on gun violence in California, a researcher, a physician named Garen Wintemute, who's at the University of California, Davis, he looked at things like the effect of the law that prohibits people here who are convicted of violent misdemeanors from having guns. Most states will have a law that says you can't own a gun if you're convicted of a felony. But California has a law that says it's not just a felony that will bar you from having a gun, it's a violent misdemeanor too, assault and battery. That law is one of the

older ones. It was passed in like 1990. They took a look at people who were convicted of violent misdemeanors the year before that law went into effect and the year after that law went into effect. And they tracked those people for three years to see whether people who had been denied guns were more or less likely to commit another violent crime. Turns out denying them guns reduced the rate of violent crime. Turns out, denying them guns reduced the rate of violent crime. They were 25 to 30 percent less likely to be charged with a new violent crime. Researchers in California have also looked at things like gun violence restraining orders. You might know them as red flag laws. Those are laws that allow the authorities to remove guns from people proactively if they're deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

And almost immediately after that law was passed, the research began. And California looked at, for example, the first sort of batch of restraining orders that were issued in the first couple of years, and they looked at those. They found that out of that batch, about a third of them had been issued because of concerns about mass shootings. The person had made a kind of a credible threat of a mass shooting and people were worried about that. Of course, there's no way to know, you know, what would have happened had the order not been issued, right? Had the guns not been taken away. But what they did find was that, okay, did any of these people then find another way to commit a mass shooting, even though we took the guns away from them?

Right. They did not. Zero of them had found a workaround to commit a mass shooting, even though they had threatened one and their guns were taken away. So the state does know that there's no perfect way to know for sure, because you're proving a negative, right? You're proving the crime that didn't happen. But there are ways to go back and design studies to get a fairly specific sense of whether these rules and new laws and policies work in California.

And one of the things that they're looking at is not just which specific laws work in which specific way, but how do the laws work as a bundle in concert? How do the laws work together? a key question because the effect of these laws is not just one at a time in some dramatic way. The effect of these laws is cumulative as a package. It reminds me personally of the approach that public health policymakers have made around the country to COVID. They call it the Swiss cheese approach, in which you layer a lot of policies on top of each other, so that even though there are holes in the policies, the holes don't line up. In the same way that we limit our risk of COVID by getting vaccinated and wearing masks and doing testing. In that same way, California has layered gun laws. California has kind of gone after this particular public health risk

in the same way that we go after other public health risks in the rest of the country. Okay, so California is essentially measuring itself, right? These laws it's passed. And it sounds like what it's finding is that when it looks at the before and after on a whole bunch of different gun laws, not just one. Right. They can tell that there is an effect. Right. They can tell that there is an effect.

And even more than that, they can tell that these laws, when taken all together, the sum total of them, when, as you say, layered on like pieces of Swiss cheese, slice after slice, the holes are covered up and the impact is really meaningful. Exactly. You know, here's the thing. Californians aren't that different from the rest of America. They lose their temper. They have mental breakdowns. They commit crimes. There are social stresses. All of the same factors that feed gun violence in the rest of the country exist in California. The one thing that is different is the policy. Now, there is one exception. The pandemic has bumped gun violence up across the

country in California as well. Murders and suicides, which is a huge part, by the way, of gun statistics. I mean, suicides are a big part of gun deaths in this country and in California as well. Two-thirds, I believe, right? That's right. So across the country and in California, well, California has not been immune. But again, have they bumped up anywhere close to meeting the rest of the country? No, they have not. The differential is still enormous.

You're still way, way less likely to die of a gunshot in California than you are in the rest of the United States. So by process of elimination, in a sense, these policies are working. So, Sean, what about people who will always find a way, you know, even if they aren't allowed to buy a gun? Say, you know, someone who has a criminal record who's really determined to get one. I mean, there's this common argument that laws don't matter because people will always find a way around them. So, are laws meaningful when we know people don't follow them? So, you know, yeah, there will always be people who break the law, you know, and it's not like California's experience is everyone's experience. Illinois, for example, has strict gun laws as well, and their rate of death by firearm is higher than California's.

It's comparable to Texas's, in fact. Interesting. There are a lot of reasons Texas's, in fact. Interesting. There are a lot of reasons for that, complicated reasons for that. For one thing, they're surrounded by places with much more permissive gun laws, and they have a much harder time preventing guns from other states from finding their way into Chicago, where people use them to commit crimes. But each place is always going to have its own sort of specific local landscape that has to be dealt with. But the way I think about it is more in terms of the way the world actually works as opposed to the way the world works in theory. You know, a lot of people think

it's all or nothing, on or off, good or bad, right? But the way that the world actually works is more in terms of better and worse, more or less. You know, something that was really interesting that the doctor went to mute, the researcher here in California, said to me the other day when I interviewed him, he said, people will say there are all sorts of laws in California and they're still not working. There was just a mass shooting here, you know, a couple of weeks ago in California. Obviously, these laws aren't working. But you wouldn't say that a law that was lowering your risk of gun death compared to the rest of the country, you wouldn't say that that law was a failure just because it wasn't 100%.

You would say, wow, I'm a lot safer in California. You know, so an approach that reduces gun deaths, it's not a failure because it doesn't reduce those gun deaths by 100%. That being said, limiting gun deaths is an ongoing project in California, you know, and sometimes there are unintended consequences. For example, the fact that California has limited gun availability in the state, that has created in California, ironically, a market for ghost guns, which have become a real problem. These are guns that are unregistered. They're sold often in kits. They don't have a serial number on them. You can't trace them. You can buy them often online.

They're a real concern in California. And it would seem like those guns exist in a lot of ways in the state of California because other legal guns are harder to get, right? That's right. They fill a niche in the market, an opening in the market. There's a demand for them, right? Yeah. But the way that the state has come to view it is, okay, well, we just need another layer of Swiss cheese then. Let's take a look at these ghost guns and we'll try to do something about that.

And so the state, in fact, right now, is considering legislation to address ghost guns and other holes. So, for example, right now the state legislature is looking at a law that would do for banned illegal guns in California what Texas did to restrict abortion. Oh, really? So tell me how that would work. Well, so remember a few months ago, Texas put into place a law that encourages private citizens to sue anyone who, quote, aids and abets an abortion.

Right. Well, California is working on a law that is modeled on that. It's fast-tracking it, in fact, and we expect it to be passed fairly soon. fast-tracking it, in fact, and we expect it to be passed fairly soon. And that law offers financial incentives for people to file civil lawsuits against anybody who sells or manufactures guns that California has outlawed, including ghost guns. So I'm remembering, Sean, that the Texas law, of course, was a law that essentially deputized ordinary people to go out and sue abortion providers, Uber drivers, anybody who was involved in abortion in the state. So it was a really radical approach legally, right? Because it was essentially stripping away somebody's federally protected constitutional right at the state level.

Right, at the state level by using the civil courts. And in fact, the governor here, California is a heavily democratic state, and the governor here had spoken against the Texas law and thought that it was a bad idea. But when the Supreme Court more or less upheld what Texas was doing, that particular tactic, California said, fine, what's good for one is good for the other, and we're going to do for guns what you've done for abortion. It's a similar strategy. We're not going to just go directly at the problem. We're going to

chip away at it bit by bit in the same way that Texas has passed for many decades, laws that chipped away at the availability of abortion. In the same way Texas has done that, California has done the same thing with guns. And advocates in both states would argue that they've saved lives. So it's, in a sense, it kind of makes sense if Texas says, okay, we can't ban all abortions, but we're going to sue you so much and so often that you're not going to want to bother with this. In the same way, California is now going to try that approach as well. of ghost guns into the state ourselves. But the threat of lawsuit is going to hang so heavily over these ghost gun manufacturers and the salespeople of these kits and so on that they're not going to want to bother. Right. I guess I'm reminded, Sean, of a lot of years I've done reporting on abortion legislation in this country. And, you know, as you say, the strategy has been

chipping away at this constitutional right. You know, each individual law might not amount to much, but the sum total of all of them has really substantially reduced abortion access in the states that have practiced that strategy. Right. And I think, you know, in the same way, California has a pretty good reason to think that chipping away at access to guns will similarly curb guns in the state and gun deaths in the state, because as you've just described, that legal strategy has worked. That's right. I fully expect to

cover more mass shootings in California. I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. But when you think about it this way, you know, it's not just chipping away at edges. This is not an abstract thing. The edges are people. There are people in the edges that are being chipped away at, you know, so it's lives. Sean, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On Wednesday night, a man with a rifle and a handgun opened fire in a medical office building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing four people and then himself.

The police did not reveal the identity of the gunman, but said he was in his late 30s and that he had deliberately singled out the office building. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun deaths and defines mass shootings as four or more victims, counted it as the 233rd mass shooting so far this year. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Thank you. white supremacist, is accused of shooting 13 people, almost all of them black, at a top supermarket in a largely black section of Buffalo on May 14th. The domestic terrorism charge alleges that the suspect acted, quote, because of the perceived race of the people injured and killed. It carries a penalty of life imprisonment without parole. And a jury in Virginia awarded Johnny Depp $10 million in damages in the trial against his ex-wife, Amber Heard. The jury found that Depp was defamed by Heard when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed as having been the victim of domestic abuse.

Depp denied that, saying she had made up the claim, and the verdict that capped a seven-week televised trial seemed to vindicate him. However, the jury also found that Heard had been defamed by one of Mr. Depp's lawyers. In a statement, Depp said the jury, quote, gave me my life back. In her statement, Depp said the jury, quote, gave me my life back. Heard, in her own statement, said she was, quote, heartbroken by the verdict and called it a setback for women. It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.