Guns across state’s lines
Assemblyman wants to prevent protesters from bringing their weapons to California.
SACRAMENTO — With potentially hundreds of activists coming to California for rallies and protests, a state lawmaker called Friday on federal officials to reject proposals that would allow people with concealed weapon permits in other states to bring their firearms to the Golden State.
Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) introduced a resolution in the Legislature in response to two measures in Congress that he said would allow out-of-state gun owners with concealed carry permits to bring their weapons into California and ignore this state’s tougher permit laws.
He said he was alarmed by news footage of the violence at the Unite the Right rally this month in Charlottesville, Va., where white nationalists openly carried firearms, including assault rifles.
“I’m not willing to throw away the progress we have made on gun safety or put our communities at risk because some backward politician in D.C. thinks they know what’s better for California than we do,” Santiago said in a statement.
“Californians expect that the gun control laws that they have supported and instituted in the name of public health and safety will hold — regardless of who is carrying that gun or where he or she is from.”
The congressional measures wouldn’t have been acted on in time for a pair of scheduled Bay Area rallies this weekend; authorities feared the demonstrations could have been marred by violence between white nationalists and counterprotesters. Organizers of the right-wing rallies, which had been scheduled for San Francisco and Berkeley, canceled them Friday.
Wendy Wheatcroft, a leader of the California chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America who supports Santiago’s resolution, said the National Rifle Assn. was behind the proposals before Congress.
“Rather than create a national standard for who can carry guns in public across our country, the NRA’s longtime top policy priority would override each state’s standards, and force states like California to accept the concealed carry permitting standards of every other state, no matter how weak, or even nonexistent, another state’s standards may be,” she said.