California’s Recent Mass Shootings Prove Gun Control Is Just the Beginning
Chun-Yen Chen was just waking up on Sunday morning when she received a panicked phone call from her son. "He said he saw the breaking news and wanted to know if I was at the party and if I was okay," she recalls. The party in question was last Saturday night’s Lunar New Year celebration at the nearby Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California, where a gunman opened fire, killing 11 people and injuring nine more in what would become the first of two mass shootings in just one week in the state.
While Chen and her family were not in attendance, the attack hit very close to home. Star Ballroom was one of a handful of studios that Chen’s son and daughter frequented as competitive dancers, and they considered themselves a part of its tight-knit community. "I know those people who normally go to the dance party and that studio," she tells BAZAAR.com. "They were like grandparents to my kids."
As the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Community Fund, Chen has had to face the very real threats against the AAPI community in recent years, including the 2021 shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead. But she never imagined something like this would happen in her Los Angeles County town, let alone at a dance hall. "This is such a joyful place for people, especially older people in retirement who are enjoying dancing and the music and doing what they love," Chen says. "Nobody would have thought this would be their last dance."
Just as the Monterey Park community—and indeed, the nation—was reeling in the wake of the Saturday’s attack, news of yet another mass shooting in California came two days later, on Tuesday, when a gunman killed seven people in the coastal city of Half Moon Bay. The Northern California shooting, believed to be a case of workplace violence, appears unrelated to the Lunar New Year massacre; however, seeing two mass shootings within a few days happen in California—a state known for its strict gun control laws and relatively low occurrence of gun violence—has left many wondering whether gun safety laws are enough.
Ranked the no. 1 state for gun safety in 2021 by Giffords Law Center, California sees around a 37% lower gun death rate than the national average, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people compared to 13.7 deaths per 100,000 nationally. And while the state has certainly had a number of notable mass shootings throughout recent history, it is typically viewed as exempt from the near-constant gun-related attacks that plague other parts of the U.S. Yet, many subject-matter experts argue that it’s really a matter of relativity.
"California has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation; however, at the same time, California’s gun laws are some of the loosest and most permissive in the Western industrialized world," explains Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA Law School and a specialist in gun policy. "So, it’s often said when there’s some kind of shooting like this, that California’s gun laws don’t work, but the truth of the matter is that we’re not a state that restricts access to guns in any significant way. We restrict a couple kinds of guns and gun accessories and require universal background checks and a 10-day waiting period, but those don’t make it impossible or illegal for anyone to have a gun."
To many Americans, California is the progressive extreme on the barometer of gun control measures, but its solutions are far from flawless. "When people say California’s gun laws don’t work, I think they’re usually holding California to an impossible standard, which is to say they expect California gun laws to completely eliminate gun violence—and that’s not possible in a heavily armed society," Winkler says. "We can reduce the daily death toll from gun violence, and California has shown that gun laws can be effective in doing just that, but we have to be realistic about the goal."
It’s also important to remember that California, even with its relatively strict gun laws, is surrounded by states with far looser gun restrictions. "We are a nation awash in 400 million guns and too few gun laws, and our states have invisible borders, where guns cross over as easily as cars do," says Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, the country’s largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence. "So, we are only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws, which in California means Arizona and Nevada."
Additionally, even as individual states have increased their gun control measures, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has undermined much of this progress with some of its recent decisions. Last year’s Bruen Ruling, for example, invalidated the "good cause" provision previously included in the permitting systems in six states, which allowed officials to deny firearm purchases to people who pose a known public safety risk. California was among the states affected by this decision, and unlike some of the others, it has yet to reverse it.
Watts believes what it really comes down to, though, is federal gun safety laws, a change that Moms Demand Action has been working toward since its founding in 2012. "This last summer, we passed the first federal gun safety legislation in 26 years, but there’s still so much more that we can do," she says. "As a nation, we can force the gun industry to stop marketing guns to kids and teens, we can stop doing business with gun dealers who have sold guns that end up at crime scenes, and we can stop the gun industry from making assault weapons and these do-it-yourself ghost gun kits that are so often found in states like California." And following the killings of the last week, many politicians, activists, and members of government appear reenergized to accomplish these goals, and more.
After enacting a compromise bill last year, congressional Democrats are once again calling to reimpose the federal ban on assault weapons that expired nearly 20 years ago, a push that President Joe Biden has echoed heavily. A number of leaders are also looking to prioritize a licensing bill, which would require gun owners across the country to hold a license to carry a gun. But it doesn’t stop at just a call for increased gun safety laws; there is also a renewed fight for public health research and nationwide dissemination of its findings.
Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, whose Contra Costa County congressional district neighbors Half Moon Bay, unveiled the "Not Here" initiative last October in an effort to help local communities implement evidence-based solutions to gun violence. Included in the initiative is the Local Gun Violence Reduction Act, which would create a local gun violence prevention effort database at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where state and local governments can input information and data on successful gun violence reduction policies in their communities. "The purpose is really to be driven by evidence-based research," DeSaulnier says. "You do this all locally, and then it becomes the model, and you’re able to draw a very clear correlation between the policy and the outcomes, which means you’ve saved lives."
While legislative action like this seeks to mitigate gun violence in the future, many leaders are aware that the current onslaught of mass shootings brings with it a host of other issues that cannot be remedied by gun control. "The after-tax profit of American gun manufacturers is under $20 billion a year, but according to two studies, the economic cost of gun violence is more than $500 billion," DeSaulnier notes. "This industry has been prolific at making profits at huge costs at every level—financial, emotional, health—for the American public."
In order to address the toll gun violence takes on its victims and beyond, nonprofits and local governments are working to compile and share resources to help those affected. "There is a strong desire to talk about gun violence and its impacts on our community, and given the two shootings that have happened, to really engage with this topic in a more meaningful way," Manjusha Kulkarni, the cofounder of Stop AAPI Hate, says. Her organization, alongside 26 other nonprofits, created a GoFundMe page to raise money for victims of the Monterey Park Lunar New Year shooting, which has already received over $800,000 in donations. But Kulkarni says it’s equally important to provide a safe place to discuss gun violence and gun control, which may in turn generate the political will to change things legislatively.
"This sort of gun violence is a uniquely American problem, and it causes very real trauma every time it happens," she explains. "So, the focus really needs to be on mental health impact, to holistically look at the health and wellbeing of all American residents and community members."
With the country still unnerved by the last week’s mass shootings, the debate around gun violence and how to reduce has become increasingly nuanced, and for many, a feeling of hopelessness has ensued. While the optics may suggest a failure of California’s gun safety laws—and have already invited a barrage of criticism over gun control’s efficacy—it’s far from that simple. "Saying that gun control is not worthwhile because these two shootings happened is like saying you shouldn’t wear a seatbelt because car accidents still happen," DeSaulnier notes. "That argument is just outrageous. We know gun control works, but the gun control we have in this country right now is simply not enough."
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