By Ramneet Singh
SACRAMENTO, CA – The CA Legislature last week gave its final approval to AB 452—authored by Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale)—that would require schools to inform families of California’s firearm storage laws.
Friedman, in 2019, also authored AB 276, which sought to “curb youth access to firearms by requiring schools to send home valuable safe firearm storage information to families.”
The lawmaker said at the time “as many as 75% of school shootings are facilitated by minors having access to unsecured firearms at home.”
According to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 54 percent of 1,444 gun owning survey respondents did not store “all their guns safely.” Although this article was published in 2018, the survey was conducted by “GfK Growth from Knowledge Networks” in 2016.
A Sacramento Bee story on the legislation noted the age of the children in those households and the reasons behind the choice of storage, adding “this new research finds that gun owners who reported a gun safety training course influenced their gun storage practices were twice as likely to practice safe storage for all their guns.”
Coauthors of the study, Cassandra Crifasi, PhD, MPH and Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH provided analysis.
According to the Washington State Legislature, “California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Texas…have laws that impose criminal liability on persons who negligently store firearms, where minors could or do gain access to the firearm.”
According to the Bee, “a study from policy non-profit RAND” which looked at the effects of CAP laws. Among other findings noted the study “found evidence for CAPs’ impact on mass shootings to be inconclusive.
