WHAT CAN WE DO TO REDUCE GUN VIOLENCE?

The horrifying shooting last weekend in Downtown Sacramento in which six people were killed and more than a dozen injured as rival gangs fired on each other was another wrenching reminder of the frequency of extreme gun violence in America. Like too many of these situations, cell-phone video brought home the horror in immediate fashion. Officers and onlookers can be seen moving as if in shock in one video from the aftermath of the Sacramento shooting. “There’s people dead everywhere,” the man recording the video says matter of factly. This is America 2022. This shouldn’t be.

But how does this change? How can this change? What has changed, really, since the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado gripped the nation and left 12 students and a teacher dead before two shooters took their own lives? The painful truth is nothing that’s happened in the last quartercentury or so of seemingly perpetual mass U.S. shootings presents an obvious blueprint for making life safer and less subject to random carnage.

The initial impulse of many liberals is to call for a ban on some or all guns and some or all ammunition or related restrictions. This in turn leads many Second Amendment advocates to cite the Constitution and express frustration that their lawful possession and use of firearms is under threat. In a nation whose political balance of power has been roughly 50-50 for decades, this has predictably led to deadlock in Congress on new restrictions.

Yet even if the House and Senate passed laws akin to those seen in many blue state legislatures over the past 25 years, would that have made a difference? The history of California, which has more than 100 laws that regulate firearm use, ownership or transactions — the most of any state — suggests not. Gun violence deaths have soared in recent years. There are an estimated 20 million guns in circulation in the state, and one in four California adults lives in a household with a gun owner, according to a UC Davis study. As of Friday, the Sacramento bloodbath was just one of four heartbreaking California incidents to qualify as a mass shooting since March 22 — the most of any state since then.

No wonder so many Californians — and the lawmakers who represent them — are so frustrated. But given that this is leading many people — from Gov. Gavin Newsom down — to embrace a bill introduced by state Sens. Robert Hertzberg, D-van Nuys, and Anthony Portantino, D-LA Cañada Flintridge, that amounts to an elaborate, dangerous stunt, everyone should be frustrated. The measure would copy Texas’ vigilante abortion law, allowing civil lawsuits to target gun users, those in the gun industry and arguably anyone with tangential involvement in gun carnage. The Supreme Court, in one of its worst decisions since the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857 backing slave owners’ “rights,” has tentatively upheld the Texas law for now.

It’s time to shelve such gimmicks and go back to the basics. Decades of academic research have laid out the path for California to rein in gun violence.

The first and foremost task is reducing the circumstances that lead young people to despair over their prospects of having productive lives in which they are valued by their communities and by society at large. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions points to the corrosive effects of concentrated poverty and structural disadvantages, evident in “redlining” rules that have marginalized communities long after the Jim Crow era. Research by the American Psychological Association consistently cites exposure at a young age to gun violence and to the use of force to solve disputes. Policing that makes many feel as if officers are occupying armies in poor neighborhoods and schools only super-charges alienation. Conversations about — and holistic approaches to — mental health are another part of this. Thoughts and prayers, less so. Passing more laws — or linking the gun violence issue to California’s rivalry with Texas — won’t address these profound problems. Until that happens, gun violence will be constant — and “there’s people dead everywhere” will be a mantra.