How Can a State that Claims to Have the Toughest Gun Control Laws in the Country Have 4 Mass Shootings in 8 Days?

Dear Friends,

California political leaders and the leaders of other gun violence prevention (GVP) organizations operating in California have repeatedly claimed that California has the toughest gun control laws in the country. Despite this claim, in just 8 days from January 16 through January 23, there have been four horrific mass shootings in California.[i] How can this be possible?

The answer is simple. While California’s gun control laws may be a little stronger than those in most other states, they’re still woefully inadequate; and California political leaders and the leaders of other GVP organizations operating in California are in denial of this fact. They’re also in denial about the fact that a lie that is every bit as blatant as the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election is preventing the adoption of stringent gun control laws in California and the rest of the USA comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings occur rarely, if ever, and in which the average rate of gun homicide is 1/25^th the rate in our country.[ii] This lie has long been promoted by the US gun lobby; it was codified into the US Constitution by a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court in the rogue 2008 Heller decision; it was compounded in the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision; and it’s even endorsed, tacitly at least, by some of our country’s best known GVP organizations. I’m talking about the lie that the Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a well regulated militia.

For reasons I won’t go into, I’m going to keep this message relatively short. (Did I just hear a sigh of relief?) I’ll go into more detail in a subsequent message (groan), and if you want more details now, please see my most recent President’s Message posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website.

Suffice it to say for the time being, though, that despite our best efforts to get other GVP organizations to join us, Americans Against Gun Violence remains the only US GVP organization that openly advocates and is actively working toward overturning Heller and its progeny and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries. Such laws include:

Changing the guiding principle for gun ownership in our country from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one.

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which the guiding principle for firearm acquisition is that a person who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so if the person is of a certain age and can pass a rudimentary background check, done instantaneously by computer in most cases, to see if the person is on a perennially incomplete database of people who meet one or more limited criteria for being prohibited from owning a gun. This guiding principle is termed, “permissive.” In all other advanced democracies, the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to prove that he or she has a good reason to own one and can handle one safely. This guiding principle is termed, “restrictive.” And recognizing that there is no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, many other democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, do not accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for acquiring one.

Banning civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause that would allow people who already own these kinds of weapons to keep them.

The United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand all promptly banned civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause, after mass shootings committed with these kinds of weapons in 1987 in Hungerford, England; in 1996 in Port Arthur, Australia; and in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. While the New Zealand ban is too recent to fully assess its effect, there have been only three mass shootings in the UK since 1987 and one in Australia since 1996.

Banning civilian ownership of all handguns, with no grandfather clause.

Handguns are the type of firearm used in the vast majority of all gun related deaths in the United States, including in most mass shootings. Following a mass shooting committed at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, in which 16 five and six year old students and their teacher were murdered by a man who legally owned the handguns he used in the massacre, Great Britain completely banned civilian handgun ownership, with no grandfather clause. There hasn’t been another school shooting since the ban went into effect, and the rate of gun related deaths in Britain is currently 1/70^th the rate in the United States.

I’ve already started receiving appeals from other GVP organizations to which I’ve contributed in the past asking me to make an additional donation related to the recent California mass shootings. I met via Zoom with the California representatives of several of these organizations last week, and they didn’t even give me time on the agenda to explain why I felt they should join us in advocating and working toward the definitive measures described above. Instead, the meeting was focused on the kinds of measures that Joshua Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, has described as “nibbling around the edges of half-measures and good intentions, dramatically out of synch with the reality of gun violence in America.” I’m not going to recommend that you don’t contribute to these other organizations. Before you contribute to another GVP organization, though, I would urge you to do enough investigation to satisfy yourself that you’re not unknowingly contributing to what I call “the other big lie,” and what the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” on the American public that he’d ever seen in his lifetime. And I’d also urge you to be sure that you’re contributing to definitive steps to end our country’s epidemic of gun violence, not merely “nibbling around the edges.”

Some people, including leaders of other GVP organizations, claim that we’ll never be able to enact stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the complete bans on civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles (including so-called “assault rifles”) that Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all promptly adopted after mass shootings in their countries in 1987, 1996, and 2019, respectively; or a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns like the ban that Britain adopted after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School massacre. I’m confident that one day we will overturn the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment and adopt these kinds of definitive gun control laws. The only question is, how many more innocent Americans, including innocent children and youth, will be killed by guns before that day arrives. Thanks for your help in making the day when take the definitive measures needed to stop our shameful epidemic of gun violence come sooner rather than later.

Sincerely,