“One of the mechanisms by which California’s laws produce their effect is [that] we have a substantially lower prevalence of firearm ownership in this state than many other states do,” [UC Davis’s Garen J.] Wintemute says. “There are fewer of those tools in circulation…and no surprise, they get used less.”
Studies show that suicides account for more than half of U.S. gun deaths; and not to mention the casualties caused by mass shootings in schools, churches, supermarkets, and other public places. Recently, California also introduced a law that allows gun violence victims to sue gun manufacturers for the damages their products cause.
“Violence is a very complex health and social problem. There is no easy fix… the one right thing to do is a lot of things at the same time,” Wintemute says. “So that if one intervention doesn’t stop a particular sort of case, maybe another one will. To do one thing in a complex system is to simply allow that system to adapt and continue to produce what it’s going to produce.”
— Andrew D. Johnson in California’s Answer to Gun Violence Could Be a Model for the Entire Country