Sacramento, CA – Gun control legislation authored by Assemblymember Philip Y. Ting (D – San Francisco) and Assemblymember Jimmy Gomez (D – Los Angeles) was approved by the Assembly Public Safety Committee today. The measure, AB 231, strengthens California’s Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws by making it a crime to negligently store a loaded firearm or leave it in a place where a child is likely to access it.
Under current CAP laws, a gun owner is criminally liable only if a child obtains and uses the firearm resulting in injury or death, or carries it into a public place. This means that a child could be playing with a loaded firearm in their own home, or a firearm owner could leave a gun on a coffee table where a child could access it, and these would not be criminal offenses. AB 231 addresses this gap in CAP laws by making such unsafe storage practices a crime.
“The cost of gun violence to society is far too high, and much of it is preventable if safety precautions are taken to keep guns out of the hands of children and others whose access to them too often ends in tragedy,” Ting said.
“Every day, guns are falling into the wrong hands, with tragic and costly outcomes. Our goal is to prevent these tragedies, especially when they involve defenseless children,” Gomez said.
In states where similar CAP laws had been in effect for at least one year, unintentional firearm deaths fell by 23 percent from 1990-94 among children under 15 years old; and gun suicides fell by 11% among teenagers. In enacting AB 231, California’s CAP laws will resemble the laws in Texas, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland and Hawaii.
Contact: Colleen Beamish (Ting), 916.319.2019
John Scribner (Gomez), 916.319.2051