By Rob Sharp
On July 23, 2021 the Visalia Times-Delta ran a story entitled “Outgunned.” The article relayed some staggering statistics about the massive number of firearms possessed by Californians who had purchased them legally but later could no longer legally possess them for various reasons.
Two decades ago, after a factory shooting in Chicago, California passed a bill that was supposed to provide a methodical way for “removing firearms from individuals who had lost their right to bear arms due to violent crimes, serious mental health issues, or active restraining orders.” That law created the Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS), compiling a comprehensive list of people who owned guns but should no longer possess them. That system would notify all law enforcement agencies in the state so that they could collect these now-illegally possessed weapons. As of the beginning of this year, 24,000 people were in the database.
The idea seemed great in theory, but enforcement has been spotty at best. Simply because a person’s name is on that list doesn’t mean that he or she will commit a violent act with a legally-purchased but now illegally-possessed firearm.
Garren Windemute is the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California’s Davis campus. Windemute said, “We’ve made a decision as a society that there are people who, for a constellation of reasons, should not be allowed to have firearms. Are we going to enforce that social decision or not?”
Part of the problem is staffing and monetary restraints within local agencies who often cannot dedicate the manpower to collect guns from those in the database. The other side of the coin is that the California Department of Justice has also had problems recruiting and keeping people in that sub-department. But the greatest part of the burden falls on the hundreds of local law enforcement agencies who must pick up the heavier share of the work.
More than 150 of the 400 local agencies responded that they had not received any of the monthly reports and spreadsheets from APPS when asked by the California Department of Justice about their progress in retrieving illegally held weapons.
“I’ve never heard of this,” wrote Mary Weimar, a senior administrative assistant with the Stockton Police Department. “That might have been nice to know about.”
In 2008, Roy Perez shot and killed his mother along with a neighbor and her 4-year-old daughter in Baldwin Park, California, with a pistol he had bought legally in 2004. Authorities acknowledged he was in the APPS database and should have had his gun taken away years before.
Just being in the APPS database does not provide probable cause for officers to get a search warrant to confiscate the gun, however. There are legal problems with the implementation of the law as it stands. Also, police do not notify APPS even when they do confiscate a firearm, miring the system in incorrect and out-of-date information.
Which raises the question: Has the law, and the millions of dollars spent to enforce it, made the streets any safer?
(Source: Robert Lewis, “Outgunned: Why California’s Groundbreaking Firearms Law is Failing,” Visalia Times-Delta, July 23, 2021)
Originally Published in the Mule Creek Post
