California was just rocked by two horrific mass shootings in less than 48 hours, leaving 11 people dead in a shooting at a Monterey Park dance hall on Friday and seven farm workers massacred in Half Moon Bay just two days later.
The tragedies are two of 39 mass shootings in the U.S. that will take place in the first few weeks of 2023. That number is higher for this point this year than on record, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one that injures or kills at least four people.
Those numbers should be a wakeup call Congress needs to pass stricter gun laws, Democrats and gun control advocates said after the shooting. “Gun violence in America requires stronger action,” President Joe Biden said after the Half Moon Bay shooting, urging Congress to pass a federal assault weapons ban.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
But a different story played out in the headlines on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, eager to point out that the two mass shootings happened in a state with the nation’s strictest gun control laws. It is in line with the point that Republicans often play out after such tragedies – that shootings in places that have tried to crack down on access to firearms, including California and Chicago, as proof that such laws do not actually stop gun violence.
Despite strict gun laws in California, “it seems that it does not work in this situation,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday in his first statement about the shootings.
But it’s not that simple.
Even though this week’s shooting took place in California, the state still has one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation — a statistic that advocates for gun control have weighed on the nation’s gun control in recent decades. The state’s mass shooting death rate is also below the national average, with Californians about 25% more likely to die in a mass shooting than the average American.
In Mississippi, Wyoming and Missouri — the three states with some of the laxest gun laws in the country — the rate of firearm deaths is about three times that of California.
“We can’t do this alone, and with all due respect, we feel that way.”
– California Governor Gavin Newsom
But for all California has enacted — universal background checks, red flag laws, assault weapons bans — it’s still the state with the world’s lightest federal gun laws. It’s easy to carry guns across state lines, federal judges citing the Second Amendment have struck down some of California’s gun bans and gun manufacturers have found loopholes to flout state regulations and sell weapons that resemble semi-automatic AR-15 rifles in California.
“We can’t do this alone, and with everything because, we feel like we are,” California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) said there are efforts by the state to limit gun violence.
The gun used by the Monterey Park shooter is generally illegal in California. Authorities said they were still trying to piece together the origin of the weapons and whether they were purchased legally outside the country or illegally from arms dealers. Police said they found a semi-automatic handgun in the Half Moon Bay shooter’s vehicle and confirmed it was legally purchased and owned.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas was among those who dismissed calls for stronger federal firearms restrictions in the wake of the California shootings.
“Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but the highest homicide rate,” he said on CNN after the Monterey Park shooting — even though his oft-repeated claim is mostly false.
“Every single one of these cases — and I guarantee you’ll see in this case, too — the shooter has a warning sign on the road. We just don’t respond or shoot,” McCaul continued. He then proposed a bill that would “take public information on the internet, have algorithms to stop these threats before they happen. This is a smart approach rather than a violation of Second Amendment rights.
But when McCaul had the opportunity to support the intervention, he did not. Like many other Republicans, he voted against last year’s bipartisan Safe Communities Act, which included federal funding for the state’s red flag law — a program that has begun to succeed in California — stricter background checks and funding for other crisis intervention strategies. .
The legislation passed, but only after Democrats agreed to gut some of its elements. Although universal background checks are popular with the majority of Americans, Republicans will only approve a background check policy that applies to people younger than 21, expires after 10 years and prohibits the use of data before people turn 16. Republicans also blocked Democrats’ red flag proposal , which would allow the removal of guns from anyone determined by a federal judge to be dangerous.