Guns: Strict California laws can’t keep illegal firearms out of state
SACRAMENTO — California has the toughest gun control laws in the country and only continues to tighten them. But its efforts are undermined by a more permissive approach in other states, including the three that border California.
This gaping loophole was exposed Sunday, when 19yearold Santino William Legan opened fire on the Gilroy Garlic Festival, killing three people and wounding 12 others before he was fatally shot by police. California bans the model of semi
automatic rifle Legan used in the attack, but he purchased it legally in Nevada.
“The reach of the California law ends at our borders, and so we cannot control what other states do,” state Attorney General Xavier Becerra said at a news conference Monday. “That’s what makes it so tough.”
Legan, a Bay Area native who lived in Walker Lake, Nev., bought the WASR10 semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine at a gun store in Fallon, Nev., on July 9, a federal law enforcement official told The Chronicle. Nevada does not prohibit such rifles from being bought and sold, although it is “absolutely illegal to bring into California,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media.
The official said that, in theory, modifications could be made to such a rifle to make it legal in California, such as welding a magazine into place, but added that no such changes were made to the gun used in the Gilroy shootings.
California has raised the minimum age for buying any gun to 21, required that all sales be completed through a licensed dealer and banned semiautomatic weapons with detachable magazines. Nevada, however, has no such restrictions. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives the state a “D” for its gun laws, though the Nevada Legislature passed a bill this year instituting background checks for private sales.
Allison Anderman, senior counsel for the Giffords Law Center, said federal law mandates that outofstate longgun purchases meet the requirements of both the state where the gun is sold and the state where the buyer is a resident.
If Legan presented California identification to try to buy his weapon in Nevada, she said, he would have been forbidden from purchasing the rifle because he was too young.
But California’s “exceptionally strong gun laws” are undercut by a patchwork of state-bystate rules, Anderman said.
While California has banned dozens of models of semiautomatic weapons since a 1989 shooting at a Stockton school, for example, neither Nevada, Arizona nor Oregon regulate socalled assault weapons.
“There’s only so much California can do, because someone can just buy a gun in a neighboring state and drive it across the border,” Anderman said.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recovered more than 41,000 guns used in crimes in California in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. Of the 27,051 that could be traced to a state, 9,564, or 36%, came from outside California. Arizona was the most common point of origin, with 2,185 firearms, followed by Nevada with 1,554.
Nevada has an urbanrural divide and a libertarian tradition that manifests in its lax approach to gun laws, said Michael Green, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In 2016, voters narrowly passed an initiative expanding background checks to private gun sales. The thenstate attorney general, a Republican running for governor, deemed it unenforceable, and it languished for two years until the Democraticcontrolled Legislature tweaked the law in February.
The discussion about gun control in Nevada’s most recent legislative session did not extend beyond the followup bill, Green said, despite the mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival in October 2017. Four rural counties have balked at the backgroundcheck law and declared themselves “sanctuaries” for the Second Amendment.
“Nevada hasn’t been interested in legislating too much,” Green said.
The Gilroy shooting renewed calls from California representatives to adopt stricter rules for gun ownership at a national level.
Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat who sponsored a Housepassed bill that would expand background checks for gun buyers, said the Gilroy shootings showed the need for a federal approach.
“There’s no electronic fence around states with stricter gun laws that prevents people from bringing guns purchased elsewhere into our state,” Thompson said.
He and other Democrats renewed calls for the GOPcontrolled Senate to take up Thompson’s bill and counterpart legislation closing a related loophole, both of which passed the House in February. The Senate has not taken any action on the bills, and key Republicans in the chamber say none is likely soon.
Thompson’s bill would expand the requirement to conduct a background check on gun purchasers to private sales. Those would include gun shows and online sales, a growing share of firearms transactions in the U.S. that are not covered by current backgroundcheck laws.
The House passed the measure along with a bill by Rep. Jim Clyburn, DS.C., to close the “Charleston loophole” — extending the deadline to complete the background check to 10 days from the current three. Its name refers to the 2015 church shootings in Charleston, S.C., in which nine worshipers were killed. The shooter would have failed a background check, but got his gun because the check was not completed before the threeday deadline expired.
The bills were the first significant gun control measures the House had passed in more than two decades.
At least 17 bills related to state gun laws are moving through the California Legislature. They include two measures that would expand the scope of the state’s gun violence restraining order system, which allows law enforcement and family members to petition a court for the removal of firearms from someone they believe poses a danger to themselves or others.
AB12, by Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, DThousand Oaks (Ventura County), would increase the maximum length of the restraining order that a judge can issue after a hearing to five years from one. AB61, by Assemblyman Phil Ting, DSan Francisco, would give employers, coworkers and staff members at high schools and colleges the right to petition for a restraining order. Similar versions of that bill were twice vetoed by thenGov. Jerry Brown.
Several other guncontrol measures that Brown vetoed have also resurfaced this year, including proposals to limit purchases of firearms to one per month, and to require parts that could be used to build a firearm at home be sold through a licensed manufacturer after a background check. San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Catherine Ho and Tal Kopan
contributed to this report.