Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed the first bill to allow private citizens to ask a judge to take firearms from their family member if they believe that person might harm others. The person would then be prohibited from purchasing any more weapons.
Law enforcement officers will also be able to file restraining orders to obtain a person’s weapons, which, according to CBS Sacramento, is already a law in Connecticut, Indiana and Texas, but the California law is the first to allow a family member to call for such a restraining order.
Other states should follow suit and adopt this same law. If someone has a reason to believe a family member could harm someone else with a weapon they possess, they should be allowed to have law enforcement confiscate the weapon.
In May at the University of California at Santa Barbara, a gunman killed six students and then committed suicide. According to Time magazine, police “were legally unable to confiscate the weapons of a man who later went on a shooting spree that killed six people, despite his family’s having expressed concerns to authorities that he would become violent.”
If this law will save any lives by preventing such a horrific crime, it is well worth implementing.
The New York Times reported that gun rights advocates have said they don’t think this new law will be very effective and may keep some people from being able to defend themselves.
No other state has tried this measure before, and this new way of trying to prevent shootings such as the one at Santa Barbara is a good start. If police have a reason, from either concrete evidence or a family’s testimony, to believe someone may harm another person with a weapon that person possesses, it should be taken away.
Police and the family of the Santa Barbara shooter were worried he could become violent, yet legally couldn’t search or obtain any guns he had. That alone demonstrates a need for this law to be passed.
The law will also help potential victims of domestic violence who feel unsafe living in a home with firearms.
According to NPR, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that any person convicted of domestic violence couldn’t own a gun.
At the time, NPR quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor as saying, “Domestic violence often escalates in severity over time, and the presence of a firearm increases the likelihood that it will escalate to homicide.”
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported in “Intimate Partner Violence and Firearms” that “compared to homes without guns, the presence of guns in the home is associated with a 3-fold increased homicide risk within the home. The risk connected to gun ownership increases to 8-fold when the offender is an intimate partner or relative of the victim and is 20 times higher when previous domestic violence exists.”
I’m glad this new California law goes even further than the Supreme Court’s ruling to help someone before domestic violence escalates to the use of a gun.
Even if the new law is aimed toward preventing people from committing crimes such as in the case of Santa Barbara, it could also help prevent domestic violence from escalating through the use of a gun.
I’m not an advocate for strict gun control, but I am an advocate for smart laws that aim to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands. This law can save lives and has the potential to make people feel safer in their homes. Hopefully, other states follow California’s example.
