The power – and limits – of California’s gun laws

Post Reports

Despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, California has experienced three mass killings in the past 10 days. Today, we examine what any state could do to stop these tragedies in a country awash in guns.

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California has a reputation as a tough place to buy a gun. The state’s patchwork of gun laws has been judged the strongest in the nation by one gun-control advocacy group.

But recent mass killings in the state, including in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, illustrate how the state’s strict gun laws are are limited by a broader reality in which gun ownership is widely considered a constitutionally protected right, firearms move freely between states with vastly different regulations and gun-control measures are dotted with exceptions.

There have already been 39 mass shootings in 2023 in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Mass shootings — in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed — have already averaged more than one per day this year. Gun violence remains significantly less common in California than in most other states, which advocates credit to the laws on the books.

Today, the Post’s West Coast correspondent Reis Thebualt joins us to examine the impact of California’s gun laws and ask what any state could do to stop these tragedies in a country awash in guns.