Strong gun laws have contributed to 56% drop in gun death rates in CA over last 20 years

[onehandle]

In 1989, a catastrophic event changed the perception of gun violence in California. A gunman took an assault rifle to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, where he killed five children and wounded 29 others as well as one teacher.

The parallels between the Stockton shooting and the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut are startling. As one news report observed, “Except for the fatal scale of the Connecticut shooting, the assault at Cleveland Elementary School here featured near-identical and tragic themes: young victims, a troubled gunman and a military-style rifle.”

The Stockton shooting shocked California and the nation, igniting calls for change. Then, as now, change was not quick to come from Congress. Instead, it was California’s legislature that responded to the demand for action, adopting the first assault weapons ban in the country that same year.

Californians were thrust back into tragedy a few years later, in the summer of 1993, when a man entered the law firm of Pettit & Martin in downtown San Francisco armed with military-style assault weapons, and walked through the office on a shooting rampage. Within minutes, he had killed eight people and wounded six more before taking his own life. In the days following, devastated members of the San Francisco legal community joined together to find solutions to prevent future tragedies by forming Legal Community Against Violence, now known as the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The shooting at Petit & Martin galvanized the resolve of legislators and supporters of commonsense gun regulation in California. In the last two decades, with the Law Center’s dedicated team of attorneys leading the way, California has become a national leader in the movement for effective gun laws.

Over the last twenty years, the Law Center has been instrumental in making California safer through an innovative mix of work at the state and local levels. At the state level, we have assisted countless legislators in the development of smart legislation to protect our communities, providing research and drafting assistance and testifying at public hearings.

http://smartgunlaws.org/the-california-model-twenty-years-of-putting-safety-first

[Jenoch]

1. I do not know how much California's gun laws

have contributed to the drop in death rates. I do know that bringing up California's AWB and Sandy Hook is a ridiculous camparison. Connecticut had a California-style AWB in effect last December.

[Hoyt]

2. Here's to California's guts. Now gun cultists will tell us an "armed society, is a polite society,"

and similar BS.

[Lizzie Poppet]

3. "post hoc, ergo propter hoc"

Just sayin'...

As a counterpoint, here in Portland, we're experiencing rates of serious crime that are the lowest since the early 60's. The only significant change to our gun laws in recent times was the adoption of "shall issue" CCW (not that I consider that to be a reason for the drop). Many states are seeing similar reductions in crime, and very few have passed more stringent gun laws. This suggests that factors other than California's strict gun control laws play a more important part.

[kestrel91316]

4. There is no proof that gun control played no role.

[Lizzie Poppet]

6. Nor is that what I'm claiming.

I'm just suggesting that the article's heavy emphasis on those laws in attributing credit to the decline in crime may be misplaced, given other variables.

In addition, some of the measures cited seem highly unlikely to be significant contributors. Case in point: the restrictions on military-looking semiautomatic rifles. Since such weapons are seldom used in crimes, strict control of them is highly unlikely to result in any significant decline in crime rates.

[Hoyt]

5. Gun control will help keep rates low, and we have enough of the darn things anyway.

[Socal31]

7. Crime is down across the board.....

Correlation != Causation