Stop selling firearms at the Cow Palace now
The state-owned Cow Palace hosts five gun shows every year, each featuring hundreds of tables of firearms and ammunition for sale and trade, with free admission for children under 12. The next Cow Palace gun show will take place on April 14-15 — just three weeks after tens of thousands of Bay Area youth and adults took to the streets to protest gun violence as part of the March for Our Lives.
It is time for the Cow Palace to stop renting space to gun shows. No California state agency should facilitate or profit from the proliferation of firearms.
A Congressional Research Service report estimated there were 317 million civilian firearms in the United States in 2009. Updating that number with a 2015 federal report on firearms commerce, the Washington Post estimates that we now have more firearms than people — millions more. Our horrific gun violence rates reflect those numbers.
Guns kill nearly 100 Americans daily, including seven children and teens, and injure twice as many more. Fifty women are shot to death by intimate partners each month.
The Gun Violence Archive counted more than 730 children and teens killed or injured by guns between Jan. 1 and the recent March for Our Lives. The San Francisco Police Department reported 160 non-fatal shooting victims, 38 firearm homicides, and more than 1,000 firearms seized in 2017.
Even when firearms are sold legally (at least initially), they may be used to kill or injure, whether accidentally or intentionally.
San Francisco and San Mateo counties have passed unanimous resolutions opposing gun shows at the Cow Palace. But because the property is owned and managed by the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Division of Fairs and Expositions, it is immune from local control. The Legislature has passed, but governors have vetoed, bills to prohibit Cow Palace gun shows. In vetoing the most recent bill in 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown left the issue to the Cow Palace Board of Directors, encouraging the board “to work with their local communities when determining their operations and events.”
The board should listen to its local communities. It should listen to the unanimous resolutions from San Francisco and San Mateo counties objecting to Cow Palace gun shows. It should listen to Alameda, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Sonoma counties, which have banned firearms (and therefore gun shows) on county property, and to Santa Clara County, which recently voted to do the same. And it should listen to the tens of thousands of local youth and adults who are saying, “Enough.”
In today’s world, it is unseemly for a state agency to promote and profit from sales of gun and ammunition. The Cow Palace board members are state officers and must consider factors beyond maximizing revenue (although even some businesses have turned away profits by changing their policies regarding sales of firearms or partnering with the NRA). The question for the Cow Palace board is simple: Do you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?