Keeping unstable people away from guns
As The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board made clear in unusual fashion Friday, two days after the latest massacre by a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle, we have no expectations that Congress will do anything any time soon to reinstall the federal “assault weapon” ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004 or to take other significant measures to reduce gun violence. Five years ago, not even the fatal shooting of 20 6- and 7-year-olds among 26 people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut led to legislative changes.
Then this weekend a group of angry, articulate students from Parkland, Florida, began to speak up and demand people their parents’ age and older do something. Now President Donald Trump has signaled he’s open to improved federal background checks for guns and to a bump stock ban. Now the outrage over gun carnage has never seemed higher.
Still, across the U.S. and especially in heavily Republican districts, some conservatives see anti-gun rhetoric as a salvo in a larger cultural war — leading some on the far right to do what might have once seemed unfathomable and to criticize the Florida students calling for tougher gun laws.
Thankfully, in California, recent days have seen reminders that there are tools available to local and state authorities with the potential to make a difference. One is Assembly Bill 1014, a 2014 state law that took effect in 2016 in response to a mass shooting near UC Santa Barbara. It allows family members and law enforcement officials to ask judges for emergency restraining orders that bar people who pose a public risk from acquiring or owning guns.
Last week, San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott announced that her office had issued gun violence restraining orders against 10 people this year alone who the office said “posed a serious danger to themselves and others.” Elliott said her office was the first in the state to adopt such an aggressive strategy for using these orders to protect public safety in the absence of congressional gun legislation.
“The city of San Diego will not tolerate federal inaction,” she said. “We’re doing everything in our power to respond to this epidemic of senseless killing by removing guns from the hands of unstable and irresponsible gun owners.”
There’s action at the state level, too. Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, says he plans to renew efforts to expand AB 1014 so that the testimony of school employees and co-workers could also be used to seek a court order prompting potentially dangerous individuals to temporarily surrender guns. In 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar measure — Assembly Bill 2607 — saying it was too soon to say if AB 1014 was effective.