SACRAMENTO — California bans guns for domestic violence offenders. It bans them for people deemed a danger to others or themselves. There is a ban on large-capacity magazines, and a ban on noise-muffling silencers. Semiautomatic guns of the sort colloquially known as “assault weapons” are, famously, banned.
More than 100 gun laws — the most of any state — are on the books in California. They have saved lives, policymakers say: Californians have among the lowest rates of gun death in the United States.
Yet this month, those laws failed to stop the massacres of at least 19 people in back-to-back mass shootings. The tragedies in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay have confounded Americans who regard California as a best-case bastion of gun safety in a nation awash with firearms.
No law will stop a criminal or a madman.
