San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gun debate propelled by assault rifle’s allure
John Parkin bought an AR15style rifle for his wife in 2016. The couple live on a remote 150acre ranch in Northern California, and Parkin, who owns gun shops in Burlingame and Lower Lake (Lake County), is often away on business.
“She needs to have something that could equal what a bad guy could have,” he said.
Steve Sposato has spent almost three decades fighting for that type of rifle and similar guns to be banned. In 1993, a man killed his wife, Jody, with a militarystyle firearm Gun sales on the rise in California.
in a San Francisco office building, in one of the nation’s first modern mass shootings.
The Lafayette resident cannot fathom why someone might need such a weapon for hunting, recreation or especially selfdefense.
“The design of the gun is to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time,” he said. “Who the hell are you expecting to knock at your front door?”
These opposing views of firearms defined by California as assault weapons — banned for sale in the state for the past three decades with mixed results, and loopholes exploited by gunmakers — show the chasm over gun laws in America at one of its widest points. Among the most popular of these are AR15style rifles, which have gained a loyal following of homeowners, hobbyists and hunters who largely reject the idea that they’re weapons of war. Intended to be the civilian, semiautomatic version of the military’s M16, the AR15 and similar models are light, easy to shoot with little recoil, and powerful.
On the other side are many who see AR15type rifles and other assault weapons as guns of choice for mass killers, with no legitimate civilian use. The same qualities that make them popular, they say, render them extraordinarily dangerous in the wrong hands.
Many of the nation’s most deadly mass shootings involved such weapons — including the massacres in Las Vegas (61 killed), the Pulse nightclub (49 killed), Newtown (28 killed) and Parkland (17 killed).
Gun advocates counter that most murders involve handguns. Of 822 California killings in 2019 in which the type of gun was determined, 762 involved handguns, 34 were committed with rifles and 26 were committed with shotguns, according to the FBI.
The controversial guns gained attention again this month after a California federal judge overturned the state’s 32yearold ban on the sale of assault weapons. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, who has struck down a number of California’s gun restrictions, went so far as to compare the AR15style rifle to a Swiss Army knife.
His words infuriated gun control proponents — including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called those comments a “disgusting slap in the face” to gun violence victims — and thrilled firearm advocates. The state attorney general appealed the judge’s ruling and the case could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.
With the overturning of the ban, California is poised to again be at the center of the gun debate — a state with an alarming amount of gun crime and a reputation for relatively strict laws, but one where sales figures reveal a huge appetite for firearms.
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Business was brisk Tuesday at Parkin’s Coyote Point Armory in
Burlingame. Last year, an estimated 1.26 million guns were bought in California, a 56% increase from the year before and the most since at least 2000.
The gun data, from the journalism nonprofit the Trace, show sales continue to peak this year. There were spikes at the start of the pandemic, the aftermath of the George Floyd murder and near the U.S. presidential election.
Judge Benitez wrote that more than 185,000 guns now defined as California assault weapons are registered in the state, meaning they were bought before the sales ban and grandfathered in.
At Coyote Point, customers waited in line to discuss handgun options, and one man hauled in a metal ammunition case to fill. The phone rang repeatedly.
“Honestly, to a lot of people, owning a gun is a lot like golf,” Parkin said as he showed off his wife’s AR15style rifle, which avoids California’s ban by being “featureless,” lacking extra grips and other popular addons. It’s a hobby, he said, and his customers buy new guns, just like golfers buy clubs, as technology improves.
Parkin grew up hunting deer. The fourthgeneration Californian has watched California institute gun restrictions that, he says, do nothing.
“If I could personally stop all the shootings, I would,” he said. “But limiting what we can buy is not helping anything.”
In 1989, the state enacted the RobertiRoos Assault Weapons Control Act, the oldest of its kind in the country. In
January of that year, a man had shot up a Stockton schoolyard with dozens of rounds from a semiautomatic rifle, killing five children and wounding 29 others and a teacher.
The law initially banned the sale of more than 50 models of semiautomatic rifles and pistols. A semiautomatic gun is one that automatically loads the next round of ammunition, but requires a pull of the trigger for each shot.
Legislators could add models to the banned list as they came to their attention, but gun manufacturers continually circumvented the law by changing the names of models. Later, certain characteristics of weapons were prohibited.
Under the revised ban, semiautomatic rifles with fixed ammunition magazines — bullet
chambers that require disassembly of the firearm to swap them out — can’t hold more than 10 rounds. Those with detachable magazines, which enable swift reloading, can’t have any of a number of features that give them added functions or make them easier to handle, such as forward grips, folding stocks that make them easier to transport, and flash suppressors that lessen muzzle blasts.
The ban has survived earlier court challenges, often by the National Rifle Association and its gun advocacy affiliates. The group has spent heavily on political campaigns, and one of the original authors of the assault weapons ban found himself the subject of a recall in 1994 by the gun lobby.
All the while, gunmakers continue to develop firearms that look and feel like AR15style rifles but are legal because they’ve been customized to make them “California compliant.”
Many California gun owners find the required modifications detract from the appeal of the weapon — though not necessarily enough to deter them from buying.
Parkin sells a Juggernaut JT9 9mm rifle with an adjustable stock and pistol grip in his store for $1,199.99. The gun is legal despite those characteristics because it has a magazine lock, slowing down reloading.
His wife’s gray and camouflage Falkor AR15style rifle is legal in California because of modifications to the stock, grip and muzzle.
“A lot of women are buying AR15s because they’re lighter and easier to shoot,” he said. “Tons of people hunt with ARs.”
higher volume of guns now in circulation in the state and across the country be? Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency room physician and gun expert at UC Davis, told The Chronicle he believes this means the U.S. is likely to experience a large increase in gun violence. His team determined that, controlling for other variables, the larger the increase in firearm purchases in a state early in the pandemic, the greater the firearm violence increase in that state in 2020. The research suggests these additional guns may have contributed to the 25% increase in homicides in the U.S. in 2020.
Even though gun sales soared last year, they were already on an upward trend before that, both statewide and
To Parkin, the divide between the two sides has never been greater.
“One side advocates owning guns as originally promised by the Founders,” he said. “Then you have people that just don’t like guns, who don’t want anyone to have them period.”
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Jody Sposato, 30, was taking a deposition in a San Francisco conference room at 101 California St. on July 1, 1993, when a disgruntled gunman carrying militarystyle guns, Gian Luigi Ferri, shot her five times in the back.
His two TECDC9s were modifications from the TEC9, with the manufacturer choosing “DC” because it avoided the District of Columbia’s gun restrictions. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would use those guns in Colorado’s Columbine High School massacre six years later.
Sposato’s daughter, Meghan, had just learned to walk at 10 months, old enough to drop a handful of dirt on her mother’s grave.
Later that year, Sposato strapped his daughter in an infant backpack and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressing thenSen. Joe Biden and helping pass, in 1994, the first federal assault weapons ban, which would expire in 2004.
“Today, you’re looking at what’s left of my family,” Sposato told the committee, his daughter teething on a toy and audience members dabbing their eyes. “Can any of you advise me how to tell a 10monthold Mommy’s died? Perhaps the manufacturer of the Intratec TECDC9 should publish this information with an in
Data spotlight
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nationwide. In 2017, the Small Arms Survey estimated that there were 393 million civilianowned firearms in the U.S. — more firearms than people in the country.
Methodology:
Gun sales data for this story came from the Trace, which compiles estimates based on National Instant Criminal Background Check System data, published by the struction manual for its murderous weapon.”
He would continue to help Gov. Gray Davis modify California’s ban, but he was not naive. “The problem with these bans is if you name any weapon, the manufacturers just change the name of the weapon,” Sposato, now 64, said in a recent interview in his backyard. “They circumvent the intent of the law and basically give you the finger. There are no morals or ethics in the gun industry. None.”
Whereas Parkin felt justified in Judge Benitez’s recent ruling, Sposato was disgusted.
“This judge is not tethered to reality. What f—ing planet is he from?” Sposato said. “I’m angry. He is clueless on the impact on people’s lives.”
Sposato owns guns. His deceased wife grew up poor in Maine, where her family hunted to put food on the table.
“I get that,” he said. “It’s a way of life.”
But when the judge compared the AR15
FBI. Though background checks don’t correspond one to one with sales, they can serve as a proxy, since licensed firearms dealers initiate background checks at the point of sale. Sales estimates may be undercounts because of statelevel permit laws. Data used for this story is seasonally adjusted to account for factors such as cyclical changes in demand, holidays and the number of days in a month. The Trace used the U.S. Census Bureau’s X13ARIMASEATS software to calculate seasonal adjustments. style rifle to a Swiss Army knife, “good for both home and battle,” Sposato felt like he was back sitting before senators in 1993.
“How many deaths does it take? What’s the number?” he said. “How many will it take to matter?”
The online gun forums lit up June 5, shortly after Benitez’s ruling.
“There truly is no intellectually honest interpretation of the 2A that would allow the ban of any semiautomatic firearm that fires bullets of a size and shape that have been around since the ink dried on the Bill of Rights,” one commenter wrote. Another warned: “This will increase pressure by the Marxists to pack the Supreme Court. Still obviously the right call.”
In his ruling, Benitez illustrated the prevalence of guns in his state.
Of the more than 350,000 rifles bought by
Monthly gun sales in California
140k
130k
120k
110k
100k
90k
80k
70k
60k
50k
40k
30k
20k
10k
0
***
Total
Handguns
Long guns
Californians since Jan. 1, 2020, “some fraction” were likely strippeddown, featureless legal versions of AR15s and the like, Benitez wrote. The state doesn’t specifically track what types of legal rifles are purchased.
“One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR15 assault rifles,” he wrote. “The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter.”
While most gunrelated deaths nationwide are linked to handguns, firearms like those banned under California’s assault weapons law were used in the seven deadliest mass shootings of the past decade. You can kill more people with them, said Robyn Thomas, executive director of Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Will regulating assault rifles end our gun violence epidemic?” she asked. “No it won’t — no single law will. Does that mean we should
Murder of George
Floyd cease to take any action whatsoever and let the gun lobby continue its profitdriven perversion of what it means to be a gun owner and an American citizen? Absolutely not.”
Citing a Harvard University analysis showing people defended themselves with a gun in less than 1% of crimes from 2007 to 2011, she said the NRA and the progun lobby had “fetishized assault weapons among their base, sowing fear of immigrants and Black Americans and then convincing the gun owners they radicalized that they can’t possibly defend their homes from these imaginary threats without weapons of war.”
Last month, a disgruntled transit worker walked into a San Jose maintenance yard and shot and killed nine coworkers before turning a gun on himself. Parkin said this was proof that the assault weapons ban does not stop mass shootings. He blamed the shooter, who carried three fully legal semiautomatic handguns, and his mental health issues.
To Sposato, the current threat to California’s assault weapons ban is more evidence that his legislative wins in honor of his late wife have been almost entirely erased. But, he said, he thinks of the lives saved by the federal and state bans and has no regrets — and no plans to rest.
“The fight will continue,” he said, “and I’m in it for the long haul.”
levee. It’s a big project with a big payoff.”
Whatever the payoff — including a wider leveetop path — the newly fortified wall will serve as a cautionary tale.
Foster City is one of several large developments built along the bay in the decades after World War II, when the region’s population was exploding and decisionmakers had no compunction about pushing as far into the water as engineering technology would allow. Now, these settings face the reality that nature can only be defied for so long. That’s why the residents of the community have little choice but to build an emphatic wall supported by interlocking steel plates.
“Foster City shows what happens when there’s no wiggle room,” said David Lewis, executive director of the environmental group Save the Bay. “They’re buying themselves a few decades. We hope.”
The conversion of marshes and mud flats along the bay dates to the Gold Rush, when newcomers to San Francisco leveled sand dunes so they could extend the fastgrowing city as much as 12 blocks into the bay.
Foster City took the casual defiance of nature to a new level.
The natural mosaic of rivulets and pickleweed gave way by 1900 to commercial oyster beds and then a dairy farm on “swampy grazing land,” in the words of one historical account. But the growth of San Francisco to the north and the emergence of Silicon Valley to the south signaled a much more urban future.
Enter T. Jack Foster and his sons, developers who purchased the 2,600acre dairy farm in 1960, and one year later submitted a plan to San Mateo County to build a new community that could hold 35,000 residents. Construction crews followed not long afterward, eventually hauling in sand from shoals off San Bruno to elevate the huge site 8 feet above sea level.
The city’s early development brought such suburban staples as the garden apartments and singlefamily homes on Ocean Beach Boulevard. They’ve been joined since 2000 by boxy condominiums and glassy office buildings.
In 2014 something else was added. A ticking clock — an expensive one.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency notified Foster City that new studies showed the existing levee was neither strong enough nor high enough to resist a major storm and the waves it might generate. Unless it was rebuilt, FEMA would designate nearly the entire city as being in a revised floodplain.
The city drew up plans for a new levee that would meet FEMA’s criteria. But it didn’t account for sea level rise projections, which brought a warning from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a state agency that must approve any projects along the bay.
“Large shoreline projects ... must be resilient to a midcentury projection of sea level rise, including risk associated with storms,” the agency said in a 2017 letter. “The commission cannot approve a project that is not consistent with the policies of the San Francisco Bay Plan.”
Taking the hint, Foster City added several feet to the levee’s design, lifting its peak above projected sea levels for the bay through at least 2050 and satisfying the commission’s rules.
The steel is thick enough to resist not only earthquakes and strong storms — and the pressure of the 100,000 cubic yards of new soil that will be packed in behind the interlocked plates — but to support an addition when and if there’s a need to go higher.
When the project went to local voters in 2018, capturing 80% of the vote, the chief selling point wasn’t the virtue of a proactive response to climate change. Instead, city leaders emphasized that while homeowners would need to pay an average of $272 annually to finance the bond, flood insurance rates would be at
$2,000 a year.
One year later, the bay commission signed off on the final design.
The upgraded levee will stretch 6.2 miles, from Redwood City under the San Mateo Bridge to San Mateo, with concrete and earthen stretches as well as the steelreinforced portions, and stand 5 to 6 feet taller than the current barrier along the open bay. The top 3 feet of steel will be visible, oxidizing as the sheets age.
The project has benefits beyond flood protection, officials say.
Where the original earthen levee had boulders facing the water and spongy ice plant facing homes, the upgraded version will be landscaped with a variety of native plants to soften the view from within.
The new levee will be 18 feet wide at the top, almost twice the width of its predecessor. The original path will be replaced by separate lanes for pedestrians and bicyclists. Another plus: Foster City’s inland channels of water — echoes of the slough that threaded the longgone marsh — will be connected to the bay so water can circulate more naturally.
“You all took the bull by the horns,” City Manager Peter Pirnejad told residents who tuned into an online town hall in late January, complimenting them on their 2018 vote. “This is a
great opportunity to brag to your neighbors a bit. We’re the first west bay city to address sea level rise.”
Most people who live on or near Beach Park Boulevard seem resigned, not boastful.
“I knew it was coming, but I was surprised at first by how tall it was,” said James Wagner, who moved into his small house facing the levee 36 years ago. “It’s quite a change.”
At the same time, “It’s smart to be thinking ahead,” Wagner said. “Foster City is being proactive. The Army Corps of Engineers didn’t leave much choice.”
Sue Spiekerman, a 24year resident who would walk her dog each day atop the levee, also has mixed feelings.
“I definitely don’t like losing access to the levee trail for two years,” she said. “But if it’s necessary in order to save our housing, it makes sense to do it now.”
Pirnejad conceded as much when leading visitors along the fencedoff levee where machines use vibration pressure to push the steel sheets into the soil.
“It’s not like the city chose to be the frontrunner,” Pirnejad said. “This was forced on us.”
When Foster City officials appeared before the bay commission in November 2019 to present their final design, thenMayor Sam Hindi called his city “the canary in the coal mine” because of the need to fortify a 20th century levee against 21st century realities.
That description is not far off, at least with regard to several projects imposed on the shoreline after World War II.
“When those people were building those places, they weren’t thinking about climate change,” said Jessica Fain, the planning director for the bay commission. “We all do what looks rational at the time and then ... fastforward to today.”
Ten miles north of Foster City, San Francisco International Airport is in the early planning stages to build a levee with 7.6 miles of concrete and steel walls that will climb at least 13 feet above today’s tides. The dimensions are large enough to withstand 36 inches of sea level rise and the waves that would accompany a 100year storm.
The airport doesn’t expect to begin construction before 2025, and the estimated budget is $590 million.
In northern Marin County, meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California State Coastal Conservancy are installing a levee to protect Bel Marin Keys — a 1960s vision of Venicebythebay where artificial lagoons are lined by 700 or so homes, far short of the 5,000 that were planned.
The tract sits amid scruffy land that has subsided several feet since farmers turned marshes into private fields by erecting a levee to the east in the early 1900s.
Those fields are part of ambitious wetlands restoration east of Novato that the Army Corps and the conservancy have been working on for more than a decade. The final phase will remove the old levee to allow 1,900 acres to revert to nature — but the barrier ringing Bel Marin Keys must be completed first.
“If we were to breach the levee at the bay currently, then Bel Marin Keys would be in trouble,” explained Jeff Melby, project manager for the conservancy.
If the region could turn back the clock, Foster City might not exist. The runways of SFO might not reach into the bay. Bel Marin Keys might not be a canalsliced culdesac.
But for now and generations to come, their presence is a reality that must be defended. It is hard to imagine the economic disruption or political firestorms that would be caused by proposing to displace entire communities or one of the nation’s largest airports.
For more than a century, too many Bay Area power brokers saw the bay’s mud flats and marshes as voids to be filled. They had no interest in the ecological value of natural habitats. No idea that sea level rise might cloud the horizon.
Which means that places like Foster City have little option but to build higher walls. Ones cloaked by shrubs and trails, perhaps, but defensive barriers all the same.
“It’s not that we can’t combat nature with engineering. We can,” said David Lewis of Save the Bay. “But it’s a high cost. And with climate change, that cost will grow exponentially.”