Gov. Newsom signs law giving Calif. broadest rules for seizing guns

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed a law that will make the state the first to allow employers, co-workers and teachers to seek gun violence restraining orders against other people.

The bill was vetoed twice by former Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and goes beyond a measure that he signed allowing only law enforcement officers and immediate family members to ask judges to temporarily take away peoples’ guns when they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Newsom is also a Democrat and signed a companion bill allowing the gun violence restraining orders to last one and five years, although the gun owners could petition to end those restrictions earlier.

The new laws are were among 15 gun-related laws that has Newsom approved as the state strengthens what the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls the nation’s toughest restrictions.

“California has outperformed the rest of the nation, because of our gun safety laws, in reducing the gun murder rate substantially compared to the national reduction,” Newsom said as he signed the measures while surrounded by state lawmakers. “No state does it as well or comprehensively as the state of California, and we still have a long way to go.”

Between 1993 and 2017, the latest available, there was a 62% decline in the gun murder rate in California, nearly double the 34% nationally, he said.

Brady Campaign spokeswoman Amanda Wilcox, who lost her 19-year-old daughter to gun violence in 2001, said that California’s laws are already so strict that the latest bills amount to “tweaks to policies already in place, ways to improve implementation” of existing limits.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have laws similar to California’s current restraining order law, but the new law that takes effect Jan. 1 will be broader.

The California law will require co-workers requesting the orders to have “substantial and regular interactions” with gun owners to seek the orders and coworkers and school employees must get approval from their employers or school administrators before seeking them. People seeking the orders will have to file sworn specifying their doing so.

The measure was opposed by gun owners’ rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the bill ”poses a significant threat to civil liberties” because orders can be sought before gun owners have an opportunity to contest the requests.

Those allowed to request orders may “lack the relationship or skills required to make an appropriate assessment,” the ACLU said. statements reasons for