The URL can be used to link to this page

Home My WebLink AboutSupplemental Attachment 2.2. Ordinance Establishing Regulations for Storage and Reporting Lost or Stolen Firearms Page 1 of 1 CITY OF SARATOGA Memorandum To: Mayor Bernald & Members of the Saratoga City Council From: Nora Pimentel, City Clerk Date: June 20, 2018 Subject: Item 2.2. Ordinance Establishing Regulations for Storage and Reporting Lost or Stolen Firearms (Written Communications) After publication of the agenda packet for the June 20, 2018 City Council Meeting, the attached written communications was received for Item 2.2. Ordinance Establishing Regulations for Storage and Reporting Lost or Stolen Firearms. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Wednesday, June 13, 2018 4:49 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance From: noreply@civicplus.com Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2018 4:47:23 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Please share your feedback on the proposed ordinance for storage and reporting lost/stolen firearms . All comments will be provided to the Saratoga City Council for consideration at the June 20 City Council meeting. You can also share your input at the Community Meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Joan Pisani Community Center Multipurpose Room, 19655 Allendale Avenue. First Name Robert Last Name Petersen Email Address Phone Number Address City Saratpga State ca Zip Code 95070 Comments I strongly support the proposed Saratoga gun storage and safety ordance Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Wednesday, June 13, 2018 6:17 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Gun Safety Ordinance ________________________________________ From: Terri Singer Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2018 6:16:03 PM (UTC‐08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Gun Safety Ordinance Hello City Council Members, I support the proposed gun safety city ordinances. This is a good effort to improve gun safety in homes. We are ALL in a new world of indiscriminate school shootings and general violence involving guns. Saratoga is not immune to potential gun violence. Let’s inact simple gun safety measures that most citizens who own guns probably use. Thank you for your putting forth these ordinances. Terri Singer Sent from my iPhone 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Wednesday, June 13, 2018 6:38 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance From: noreply@civicplus.com Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2018 6:36:36 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Please share your feedback on the proposed ordinance for storage and reporting lost/stolen firearms . All comments will be provided to the Saratoga City Council for consideration at the June 20 City Council meeting. You can also share your input at the Community Meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Joan Pisani Community Center Multipurpose Room, 19655 Allendale Avenue. First Name Tony Last Name zuccarino Email Address Phone Number Address City SARATOGA State CA Zip Code 95070-5433 Comments I oppose this ordinance, since it's too vague on what constitutes a locked container, though I am sympathetic to several of the theoretical benefits of this proposal. There are too many ways to cheat this ordinance that will effectively only burden the homeowner, while only slowing down the illegal taking and use of the firearm. Besides which we don't need to spend city money on this topic, only to have the NRA or some 2 state organization file suit to block, which based on the Hellyer Supreme Court decision, you will most likely lose. Check into it. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Thursday, June 14, 2018 9:45 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance From: noreply@civicplus.com Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2018 9:43:34 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Please share your feedback on the proposed ordinance for storage and reporting lost/stolen firearms . All comments will be provided to the Saratoga City Council for consideration at the June 20 City Council meeting. You can also share your input at the Community Meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Joan Pisani Community Center Multipurpose Room, 19655 Allendale Avenue. First Name Charles Last Name Hunger Email Address Phone Number Field not completed. Address Field not completed. City Field not completed. State Field not completed. Zip Code Field not completed. Comments Why do we need a city ordinance? It's already a state law ((Pen . Code, §§ 23635-23650), which says that ALL firearms must have a safety locking device, like a cable or trigger lock, and/or be stored in an approved safe. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Thursday, June 14, 2018 12:57 AM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance From: noreply@civicplus.com Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2018 12:56:09 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Please share your feedback on the proposed ordinance for storage and reporting lost/stolen firearms . All comments will be provided to the Saratoga City Council for consideration at the June 20 City Council meeting. You can also share your input at the Community Meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Joan Pisani Community Center Multipurpose Room, 19655 Allendale Avenue. First Name Jeff Last Name Walker Email Address Phone Number Field not completed. Address Field not completed. City Field not completed. State Field not completed. Zip Code Field not completed. Comments I’m afraid that this ordinance will do ABSOLUTELY nothing to stop or deter the use of a firearm. The city continues to add ordinances without any inforcement. This one is crazy. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Friday, June 15, 2018 11:34 AM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence SUPPORT letter for Safe Storage Ordinance Attachments:Saratoga safe storage support letter 06.15.18.pdf From: Allison Anderman Sent: Friday, June 15, 2018 11:32:34 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Cc: Mary-Lynne Bernald; Manny Cappello; Howard Miller; Emily Lo; Rishi Kumar Subject: Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence SUPPORT letter for Safe Storage Ordinance Dear Mayor Mary-Lynne Bernald and the members of the City Council, On behalf of Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, please find the attached letter in support of the proposed safe storage ordinance that will be read at the June 20, 2018 meeting of the City Council. Sincerely, Allison Anderman -- Allison Anderman Managing Attorney Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence | giffordslawcenter.org @GiffordsCourage Nothing contained in this communication is intended as legal advice to any person or entity and should not be regarded as such. Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and its attorneys provide general information about gun laws to interested groups, individuals, and legislators. Giffords Law Center attorneys do not represent clients and do not form attorney‐client relationships. You should not consider communications with Giffords Law Center or its attorneys to be confidential unless we have agreed to such confidentiality. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Saturday, June 16, 2018 4:34 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Firearms legislation From: Larry Townsend Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2018 4:32:19 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Firearms legislation From: Larry Townsend For Saratoga City Council, please distribute. Education before Legislation is a wiser decision Rather than reacting to a problem is it not advisable to prevent its beginnings? Self defense is a fundamental part of all mankind and our civil rights provide for that with the rules of law in this country. Mankind comes along to invent tools made of stone, stick, sinew and metals. The tools gave them an advantage acquiring protein and a means of defense from aggression. When push comes to shove human ingenuity has parlayed those skills to the extreme. Constructively we put instruments into space to visit other planets in our solar system and beyond. Destructively armies have launched nuclear weapons to stop all out wars. Domestic firearms pale by comparison but remain a tool as intended for the deterrent of life threatening crimes. The trick is educating the defendants to their levels of responsibilities and putting fear in the heart of the criminal aggressor. Owning a firearm is a responsibility and a liability that requires an education and training. Criminal use of any tool capable of lethal force needs to be punished summarily. Taking away our tools for self defense will only embolden criminal use of life threatening objects. Please don’t be lead away from reason. The State of California has already covered every ordnance you are about to implement. Best regards. Lawrence Townsend a frequent visitor to Saratoga 2 Zip-95123 Sent from my iPhone 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Saturday, June 16, 2018 10:03 AM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Proposed gun legislation From: Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2018 10:01:00 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Proposed gun legislation This proposal is basically covered by state laws. The only people who conform to any law/regulation are the ones whose behavior need not be regulated. On a practical level,this yields a net nothing concerning misbehavior in the populace which misbehaves. It does however, stoke the causes of various groups such as the NRA,CRPA etc..etc. and increases their financial resources. When such frivelous legal actions are taken, panic sets in and gun owners stock up on ammo and arms. President Obama wins the industries "Gun Salesman of the Year" award by the firearms industry every year. In contrast, President Trump's support of 2nd Amendment rights has forced some firearms manufactures into bankruptcy. The trend here is pretty clear, gun control results in more people acquiring more firearms and ammo. California's robust approach to gun control created the 80% lower receiver market which arguably causes no gun control via 'ghost guns'. These products had no market 25 years ago when there was no perceived need for them. It would be wise to pay attention to this reality and ignore this proposed fantasy. sincerely Michael Hansen Ojai, CA 93023 ____________________________________________________________ We Say Goodbye To Kelly Ripa risingstarnewspaper.com http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3132/5b2542549515b42540d7bst01vuc 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Sunday, June 17, 2018 8:56 AM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Proposed firearm storage ordinance From: Amro Sirhan Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2018 8:54:50 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Cc: Rishi Kumar; Amro Sirhan Subject: Proposed firearm storage ordinance Dear City Council of Saratoga, I am a resident of Saratoga and have been for over 13-years. I wanted to thank you for making our City safe and clean. I am writing to you to urge you to vote against the proposed firearm storage ordinance for the following reasons: 1. First of all there is several state laws that exist in place covering this area as you already know and have quoted them on your web site 2. This proposed ordinance will further victimize the victim. Put yourself in the shoes of a citizen who had just come back from work to find that his or her house had been broken into and many of his or her valuable possession were stolen. This proposed ordinance would be forcing the responding Deputy to tell the victim that it was their fault for not properly storing their legally owned property in their own house. The deputy would have to issue a citation to the victim when the victim is expecting the Deputy to do everything in their power to catch the suspect. 3. We need to stop further victimization the victim. The action needed is to be tougher on criminals not on law abiding citizens. Tougher laws and mandatory jail sentences to burglary suspects. 4. Burglaries (home and vehicles) have been on the rise in the bay area due to the so called “early release of nonviolent criminals.” Please explain to me how this ordinance will help reduce crime and penalize the criminals. 2 I urge you to consider ways to make it harder for the criminals to victimize our citizen and our beautiful city. Let’s be tougher on crime and criminals and not make the life of law abiding citizen harder than it already is. What is really needed is to provide our Deputies with all the tools and resources they need to drive burglars away from our streets and lovely city. Adopt ordinances that impose mandatory jail sentences on criminals that break into citizen’s homes and victimize them. Sincerely, Sirhan family Saratoga, Ca 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:11 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Proposed Gun Storage Law From: Mark Weisler Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:09:42 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Proposed Gun Storage Law Hon. Mary-Lynne Bernald, Mayor Hon. Manny Cappello, Vice Mayor Hon. Howard Miller, Council Member Hon. Emily Lo, Council Member Hon. Rishi Kumar, Council Member Dear Honorable Council Members: I am opposed to the proposed mandatory gun storage law you are considering. My reasons are below. The Proposed Law… Violates the Second Amendment by infringing on the Second Amendment. It reduces the rights of the citizen in his own home. -United States Supreme Court: the “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right[,]” and “the need for self-defense, family, and property is most acute” in the home.- Heller -Because of the importance of self-protection in the home, the Supreme Court expressly held that “any ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does [a] prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home inoperable for the purposes of immediate self-defense.” The Heller decision at the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment is an individual right to bear arms. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008),[1] is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban and requirement that lawfully-owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee. Violates the Fourth Amendment concerning privacy which provides for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Violates the Oath of Office You Took to Uphold the Constitution Will Not Make Children or Anyone Safer 2 Doesn’t Address Physical Security in Schools: If we want to have safe schools, why don’t we? We safeguard courthouses and government buildings. Why can’t Council work with school boards and security experts (not necessarily law enforcement) to secure our schools? What have you done in this regard? Is Vague — A citizen can’t completely discern when they are breaking the proposed law. Keeping the firearm at all times within “arm’s length” is one interpretation of the proposed law. Another, according the Sheriff’s Lieutenant at the recent community meeting, is the “total circumstances extant at the time of the crime or situation” which means the citizen will not know if they are breaking the law and the matter will be left to the judgement of law enforcement on the scene and later the district attorney. Substitutes laws for civility and virtue. This proposed law substitutes standardized, required behavior for civility, judgement, and virtue. I would rather have the matter addressed through education, training, and community than forced constraint. Does Not Address Mental Health — If we want to do more to reduce “gun violence” we should safeguard the mental health of the children. Have you taken steps to ensure that children and students in your community each has someone to talk with about issues? What have you done to recognize and stop bullying? We need to teach skills in how to deal with issues and problems so they don’t feel weapons are the solution. I would like to see our community genuinely deal with the mental health aspect of gun violence, starting with young people, rather than infringe on Constitutional rights. Sincerely, — Mark, Saratoga Resident 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Monday, June 18, 2018 1:13 AM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Proposed ordinance re. locking reliquary firearms & a more reasnable suggestion Attachments:20171111_093724_resized.jpg; Scan0041.pdf; 20160317_123653 (2).jpg; 20160620_ 173959 (1).jpg From: Jerry Jeska Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 1:09:56 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Cc: Nora Pimentel Subject: Fwd: Proposed ordinance re. locking reliquary firearms & a more reasnable suggestion Dear Saratoga City Council Member: Why must an owner be required to keep relic and antique replica firearms, such as those here pictured attachments, locked up? While all except two are indeed functioning pieces, these relics and replicas of antiques would never be burglarized for the purpose of commission of crimes, certainly no "mass shootings". Antiques and replicas thereof do not fire modern ammunition so few individuals would have any idea how to load them. (The Civil War replica, item #5, is a cap and ball gun which does not handle cartridges any more than do the muzzleloaders.) The US Government does not even consider antiques to be "firearms". While I've shot and hunted with the muzzleloading long guns, most would be used as display items. Many of your constituents possess relics--impossible to display locked in a safe and trigger locks would ruin the display appearance. Moreover, the entire trigger guard of the items in pics #2-3 can be removed with a simple screwdriver. Anything not welded can be disassembled. Incidentally, trigger locks can be removed from any firearm via use of an electric drill. One could not even mount a trigger lock on the two antique revolvers. Item #4 will not hold a trigger lock, which would simply slip off as it has no trigger guard to hold it. Not only would this storage provision not deter theft of relics and antique replicas, it would not prevent suicides (by far the most common cause of firearm deaths). Few suicide-inclined family members would know how to load these items, and a suicidal owner would have any lock keys and safe combinations anyway. Many of your constituents possess (hunt with and maybe collect) bolt action rifles. While they do use modern ammunition, such rifles are rarely be used for, or stolen for, commission of crimes. Why should these be required to be locked up? (See attachment 20160317_123653 showing a WWI model relic painstakingly converted into a hunting rifle.) Long guns are used in only about 3% of gun crimes, according to reports by former state Attorney General Kamala Harris. https://www.oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/publications/firearms-report-15.pdf https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/publications/firearms-report-14.pdf Gun owners do not like being stolen from. Particularly if the item is a family heirloom owners will commonly take reasonable precautions such as burglar alarms, decorative window bars or safes/locking devices (if deemed warranted). Theft of any legally owned firearms will be willingly divulged in a police report, if only to secure insurance compensation. Therefore a requirement such as San Jose has adopted regarding reporting of theft is superfluous. 2 Once again-- If burglarized, none of the antiques or replicas would be suitable for commission of crimes. Trigger locks on these items would ruin their display purpose. Owners do not want to lose their firearms in a burglary and will take measures to deter such. Excepting the bolt action rifles, none use modern ammunition, nearly eliminating their use for commission of suicide or criminal activity. Should you have questions regarding any of the pictured items and their application to my points, please feel free to contact me. Ordinances should not be passed without consideration of unintended consequences/collateral damage. Constitutional rights should not be compromised, especially when no enhancement of public safety will be thus achieved. Please reject this oppressive, useless ordinance. Instead take substantive, effective measures: You can help firearms owners protect the public by joining with other Santa Clara Co. cities to urge the CA state legislature to restore the felonious status of firearms theft. (Currently the theft of less than a value of $950 is only a misdemeanor, and most gun-related crime involves firearms costing less than that amount.) You can protect students by urging schools to have their safety programs reviewed and assessed through the free School Shield program. I understand that grants are available to implement those recommendations. I appreciate your time and attention. Regards, Jerry P. Jeska MA-history 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Monday, June 18, 2018 7:18 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance From: noreply@civicplus.com Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 7:16:45 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Online Form Submittal: Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Proposed Firearm Storage Ordinance Please share your feedback on the proposed ordinance for storage and reporting lost/stolen firearms . All comments will be provided to the Saratoga City Council for consideration at the June 20 City Council meeting. You can also share your input at the Community Meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Joan Pisani Community Center Multipurpose Room, 19655 Allendale Avenue. First Name Ray Last Name Froess Email Address Phone Number Address City Saratoga State CA Zip Code 95070 Comments I sent an email to 'saratoga_cc@saratoga.ca.us' Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Monday, June 18, 2018 4:35 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: Proposed Saratoga Gun Laws From: Ray Froess Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 4:33:33 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: Proposed Saratoga Gun Laws Thanks for having the meeting May 29 on the Storage of Firearms in a Residence and Reporting Lost or Stolen Firearms. I hope you don’t pass these laws. What evidence is there that these proposed laws will improve safety? Unless people know the law, it won’t have any effect other than punish them after they unknowingly break it. Do you know that the 2017 California Guns Law book is 560 pages? In addition, we have Federal laws, County laws (which I don’t know) and now we are considering adding City laws too. How many of us curly up and read the City’s “Code of Ordinances”? I think most residents have enough sense to not leaving a gun laying around and to report a missing gun. Do we need a “nanny” ordinance about kitchen knives too? Speaking of knives, do you know that a person armed with a knife 21 feet away can get to an officer before he can unholster his gun? How long will it take to unlock your gun in a home invasion? Instead or passing more laws I’d suggest the City develop a list of safety items and add these to the list. A good starting point is are some of the items in the “Saratoga Neighborhood Watch” brochure at http://www.saratoga.ca.us/DocumentCenter/View/1563/Neighborhood‐Watch‐Brochure‐PDF?bidId= Ray Froess 659 [Journal of Law and Economics,vol. XLIV (October 2001)] 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-2186/2001/4402-0014$01.50 SAFE-STORAGE GUN LAWS: ACCIDENTAL DEATHS, SUICIDES, AND CRIME* JOHN R. LOTT, JR. American Enterprise Institute and JOHN E. WHITLEY University of Adelaide Abstract It is frequently assumed that safe-storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates is ignored. We ﬁnd no support that safe-storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deathsor suicides. Instead, these storage requirements appear to impair people’s ability to use guns defensively. Because accidental shooters also tend to be the ones most likely to violate the new law, safe-storage laws increase violent and property crimes against law-abiding citizens with no observable offsetting beneﬁt in terms of reduced ac- cidents or suicides. I. Introduction The beneﬁts of laws requiring that citizens safely store their guns seem undeniable, in terms of both fewer juvenile accidental gun deaths and sui- cides. Some have argued that these restrictions might also reduce crime rates to the extent it makes it more difﬁcult for criminals to steal guns. This is an issue that most congressional Republicans and Democrats agree on. If new gun control laws are passed during the 2000–2001 legislative session, one component of the bill probably will involve mandating trigger locks to be included with any gun sales. Similar views were expressed by presidential candidates of both major parties in the 2000 campaign. 1 During just the last couple of years, numerous states considered laws mandating safe storage of guns. Illinois passed a law mandating that guns be kept locked or otherwise securely placed when a child under 14 may have access to them, and New Jersey and California passed new laws requiring guns be sold with locks. 2 * We would like to thank Gertrud Fremling, David Kopel, Bill Landes, and the seminar participants at Dartmouth College, University of Santa Clara, and the University of Washington for helpful discussions. 1 David B. Ottaway, A Boon to Sales, or a Threat? Wash. Post, May 20, 1999, at A1; John McCain Proﬁle, Nat’l J., November 6, 1999. 2 Mark Schauerte, Gov. Ryan Signs Bill That Requires Firearm Owners to Store Guns, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1999, at A1; Editorial, Trigger Locks, The Record(BergenCounty, N.J.), October 14, 1999, at L10; and Rene Sanchez, The Battle for California, Wash. Post, October 23, 1999, at A1. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 660 the journal of law and economics Concerns over accidental gun deaths and suicides are important in this debate. In 1998, 53 children under age 10 died from accidental gun deaths. In cases where the weapon involved could be identiﬁed, six of these deaths involved handguns. Only one suicide with a gun is reported in this age group. When all children under age 15 are examined, the total number of accidental gun deaths totals 121, of which 26 were identiﬁed as involving handguns. The number of gun suicides is much higher than for younger ages, 154. 3 A study by the General Accounting Ofﬁce claims that mechanical locks—such as those that ﬁt over a trigger or in a barrel of a gun—provide “reliable” protection only for children under age 7, 4 so it is unclear what percentage of older children’s deaths would have been prevented by the use of these locks. Nor would the locks even have been relevant in accidental gun deaths for cases where the gun cannot be realistically be locked up, such as hunting. But gun locks are costly, too. Not only is there the actual expense of the locks, but even more potentially important is the reduced effectiveness of using the gun defensively. Locked guns may not be as readily accessible for defensive gun uses. If criminals are deterred from attacking victims because of the fear that people might be able to defend themselves, gun locks may in turn reduce the cost of criminals committing crime and, thus, increase crime. This problem is exacerbated because many mechanical locks (such as barrel or trigger locks) also require that the gun be stored unloaded. 5 Loading a gun then requires yet more time to respond to a criminal. 6 The costs of locks and the fear of accidental gun deaths, whichishighlypublicized when these laws pass, should also reduce gun ownership and may thus also further encourage crime. 7 There is evidence that restrictions on people’s ability to defend themselves encourages criminals to attack. The potential defensive nature of guns is indicated by the different rates of so-called hot burglaries, where residents 3 There is an issue of whether deaths are properly classiﬁed as accidental, but the bias frequently appears to be to err on the side of classifying deaths as accidental. 4 The study argued that the mechanical locks could frequently be pried off with a screwdriver or smashed with a hammer. U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce, Accidental Shootings: Many Deaths and Injuries Caused by Firearms Could Be Prevented (March 1991). 5 Putting a lock on a loaded gun actually makes an accidental dischargepossible(forexample, by dropping the gun) that would not be possible if a loaded gun were not locked. 6 One almost humorous example of the problems associated with removing gun locks was provided by Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, who set up a press conference to dem- onstrate how easy it was to use a gun lock, but the lock did not easily disengage and it took him “numerous” tries before he was able to remove the lock (Gerald Mizejewski, Glendening Shows Off Trigger Lock, Wash. Times, March 23, 2000, at C1). 7 Data that we have from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey does indicate a drop in state gun ownership rates coinciding with the passage with safe-storage laws. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 661 are at home when the criminals strike. 8 Fifty-nine percent of the burglaries in Britain,which hastough gun control laws,are“hotburglaries.”Bycontrast, the United States, with laxer restrictions, has a “hot-burglary” rate of only 13 percent. Consistent with this, surveys of convicted felons in America reveal that they are much more worried about armed victims than they are about running into the police. This fear of potentially armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts “casing” a house to ensure that nobody is home. Felons frequently comment in these interviews that they avoid late-night burglaries because “that’s the way to get shot.” 9 After Tasmania’s horrible multiple victim public shooting in 1996, Aus- tralia outlawed defensive gun ownership, instituted strict locking require- ments for guns, and banned many types of guns. But neither total crime nor total crime with guns declined in Australia. In the 4 years after the law, armed robberies rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by37percent,assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent. 10 And although murders did decline by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent. 11 On the other hand, those supporting safe-storage laws point to how locking up guns can reduce crime by discouraging or preventing burglars from ob- taining guns through theft. 12 The effects in both directions seem plausible, 8 For example, Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control (1997); David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy (1992); and David B. Kopel, Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars: Lawsuits against Gun Companies and the Problem of Positive Externalities (paper presented at the American Criminology Meetings, Toronto 1999), provide international evidence on hot-burglary rates. 9 James D. Wright & Peter H. Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms 151 (1986), interviewed felony prisoners in 10 state correctional systems and found that 56 percent said that criminals would not attack a potential victim that was known to be armed. They also found evidence that criminals in those states with the highest levels of civilian gun ownership worried the most about armed victims. Examples of stories where people successfully defend themselves from burglaries with guns are quite common (see John R. Lott, Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (1998), and Robert Waters, The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm (1998)). For example, see Burglar Puts 92-Year-Old in the Gun Closet and Is Shot, N.Y. Times, September 7, 1995, at A16. George F. Will, Are We “A Nation of Cowards”? Newsweek, November 15, 1993, discusses more generally the beneﬁts produced from an armed citizenry. 10 The Australia Bureau of Statistics can be found at http://www.abs.gov.au. 11 England also recently banned handguns and centerﬁre riﬂes and shotguns, yet it now leads the United States by a wide margin in robberies and aggravated assaults, and although murder and rape rates are still higher in the United States, that difference has been shrinking (Nicholas Rufford, Ofﬁcial: More Muggings in England than US, Sunday Times (London), October 11, 1998). 12 While we know of no empirical evidence that has been provided to back up this claim, it has been an issue that has been raised in legislative debates over safe-storagelaws.Legislative hearings on safe-storage laws have raised this issue in both Hawaii (February 15, 2000) and Maryland (February 16, 2000). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 662 the journal of law and economics but the question is the relative sizes of the effects, and that is an empirical question. Guns are not the ﬁrst item with safe-storage laws that economists have studied. Safety caps for medicines have been required for many years now and have been studied extensively. Surprisingly, Kip Viscusi found that safe- storage rules in this area actually lead to more poisoningsbecauseofa“lulling effect.”13 Because of the safety caps, he argues, families no longer store medicines as far out of children’s reach as previously. A similar result could occur for guns if the General Accounting Ofﬁceiscorrectthatgunmechanical gun locks are not that reliable. 14 Despite the active policy debate on guns, there has been surprisingly little similar research on the safe storage of guns. Results similar to those for medicine safety caps or automobile safety regulations could be quite im- portant for this debate. While a medical journal provides some preliminary evidence on safe-storage laws and accidental gun deaths, 15 no evidence exists on any of the other possible effects of these laws. No one has investigated the impact of these laws on suicides or on the possible costs of these laws, in particular, whether the laws make it difﬁcult for people to quickly access a gun for self-defense. II. The Existing Literature David Klein and coauthors argued that accidental gun deaths and gun suicides are strongly linked to owning a gun for self-defense. 16 Studying all the fatal gun accidents involving persons under age 16 in Michigan from 1970 to 1975, they concluded that guns used in fatal accidents were nearly always kept for self-protection. While they did not have direct evidence to prove this point, Klein and coauthors claimed that “guns used for self- protection are more likely to be involved in accidental shootings because hunting or target guns are much less likely to be stored loaded or to be kept where they are readily accessible.” In a later paper, Klein found that pre- 13 W. Kip Viscusi, The Lulling Effect: The Impact of Child-Resistant Packaging on Aspirin and Analgesic Ingestions, 74 Am. Econ. Rev. 324 (1984). 14 This is part of a more general phenomenon. As Sam Peltzman, The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation, 83 J. Pol. Econ. 677 (1975), has pointed out in the context of automobile safety regulations, increasing safety restrictions can result in drivers offsetting these gains by taking more risks in how they drive. Indeed, recent studies indicate that drivers in cars equipped with air bags drove more recklessly and got into accidents at such sufﬁciently higher rates that it offset the life-saving effect of air bags for the driver and actually increased the total risk of death posed to others (Steven Peterson, George Hoffer, & Edward Millner, Are Drivers of Air- Bag-Equipped Cars More Aggressive? A Test of the Offsetting Behavior Hypothesis, 38 J. Law & Econ. 251 (1995)). 15 Peter Cummings et al.,State Gun Safe Storage Laws and Child Mortality Due to Firearms, 278 JAMA 1084 (1997). 16 David Klein et al.,Some Social Characteristics of Young Gunshot Fatalities, 9 Accident Analysis & Prevention 177, 181 (1977). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 663 dominately low-income urban families with child gunshot victims had “kept loaded guns within ready reach because they had no conﬁdence that the police offered them protection against neighborhood crime.” 17 If Klein and his coauthors are correct in that it is guns primarily stored for self-defense that result in accidents and if gun owners are correct that guns help mitigate harm when an attack occurs, safe-storage laws could reduce fatal gun accidents while simultaneously decreasing the ability for self-protection. This would thus lower the cost to criminals and increase crime. The empirical question is then whether the reduction in accidental gun deaths or suicides outweighs any costs from increased crime. The test carried out in this paper will provide some qualitatively different evidence on the ability of guns to deter criminals. 18 Half of all fatal gun accidents are self-inﬂicted. In cases where the fatal injury is inﬂicted on somebody else, the person ﬁring the gun is on average 6.6 years older than the victim. Shooters tend to be between the ages of 15–24 and from low-income families. Data from 1980 indicate that the race of the victim and shooter were the same in 96.5 percent of the cases, while the sex was the same in 75 percent of the cases. Shooters also tend to demonstrate “poor aggression control, impulsiveness,alcoholism,willingness to take risks, and sensation seeking.” 19 Others have found that accidental shooters were much more likely to have been arrested for violent acts and/ or for alcohol-related offenses, and a disproportionate number had been in- volved in automobile crashes and trafﬁc citations. 20 They were also much more likely to have had their driver’s licenses suspended or revoked. Passing safe-storage laws that are largely unenforceable might result in only those who are the most “law-abiding citizens” to change their behavior. But, as just discussed, these are not likely to be the high-risk groups for accidental shootings. Because accidental shooters tend to be more likely to 17 David Klein, Societal Inﬂuences on Childhood Accidents, 12 Accident Analysis & Pre- vention 275, 277 (1980). 18 There is a large literature on the ability of guns to deter criminals, including Ian Ayres & John J. Donohue III, Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy, 1 Am. L. & Econ. Rev. 436 (1999); William Alan Bartley & Mark A. Cohen, The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis, 36 Econ. Inquiry 258, 259 (1998); Dan A. Black & Daniel S. Nagin, Do Right-to- Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime? 27 J. Legal Stud. 209 (1998); Stephen G. Bronars & John R. Lott, Jr., Criminal Deterrence, Geographic Spillovers, and the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns, 88 Am. Econ. Rev. 475 (1998); Kleck,supra note 8; Lott,supra note 9; John R. Lott, Jr., The Concealed-Handgun Debate, 27 J. Legal Stud. 221 (1998); John R. Lott, Jr., & David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, 26 J. Legal Stud. 1 (1997); Florenz Plassman & T. Nicolaus Tideman, Geographical and Temporal Vari- ations in the Effects of Right-to-Carry Laws on Crime (working paper, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. & State Univ. 1999); Lawrence Southwick, Self-Defense with Guns: The Consequences (working paper, SUNY Buffalo 1997); and Wright & Rossi,supra note 9. 19 Kleck,supra note 8. 20 Julian A. Waller & Elbert B. Whorton, Unintentional Shootings, Highway Crashes, and Acts of Violence, 5 Accident Analysis & Prevention 351 (1973). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 664 the journal of law and economics violate the laws anyway, it is possible that safe-storage laws will raise the cost of deterring criminals where the beneﬁt of reducing accidents is smallest. The issue of suicide raises two questions: (1) whether safe-storage or other gun control laws prevent suicides using guns and (2) whether these laws reduce total suicides or merely change the method of suicide. However, the second question becomes relevant only if safe-storage laws indeed have much of an effect on gun suicides. The few existing studies that test for the impact of gun control laws (but not safe-storage laws) on total suicide rates use cross-sectional level data and ﬁnd no signiﬁcant relationship. 21 Some other studies use proxies for gun ownership rates (for example, the number of federally licensed ﬁrearms dealers or subscriptions to gun magazines) and analyze whether they are correlated with suicides. 22 Still other studies use surveys on individual suicide attempts, so as to describe various individual characteristics (such as impulsiveness) and examine whether suicides are more likely when guns are available. 23 The normal assumption is that more guns will almost by deﬁnition increase both accidental gun deaths and gun suicides, although as this discussion suggests that it is possible that the risks vary with the type of household buying guns. Yet an appendix, which is available from the authors, provides evidence (based on either ownership data from the General Social Survey or gun magazine sales) that the link between gun ownership and either of these types of death is actually fairly difﬁcult to establish. Survey data on gun ownership rates are never statistically related to accidental gun deaths or gun suicides, and using gun magazine sales as a proxy for gun ownership 21 Martin S. Geisel, Richard Roll, & R. Stanton Wettick, Jr., The Effectiveness of State and Local Regulation of Handguns, 4 Duke Univ. L. J. 647 (1969); Douglas R. Murray, Handguns, Gun Control Laws, and Firearm Violence, 23 Soc. Probs. 81 (1975); Matthew R. DeZee, Gun Control Legislation: Impact and Ideology, 5 Law & Pol’y Q. 367 (1983); and Myron Boor & Jeffrey H. Bair, Suicide and Implications for Suicide Prevention, 66 Psychol. Rep. 923 (1990). Kleck,supra note 8, at 287, summarizes his take on this research by claiming that “[o]n the whole, previous studies failed to make a solid case for the ability of gun controls to reduce the total suicide rate.” Geisel, Roll, & Wettick (supra, at 676) ﬁnd evidence of a reduction in suicide with respect to an index that they create on gun control, but they could ﬁnd nosigniﬁcant or even meaningful results when they used dummy variables for the different laws. 22 There is a debate within criminology and the medical literature over whether the acces- sibility of guns leads to higher suicide rates, but this literature does not address the impact of safe-storage laws, and the evidence is fairly primitive. For example, a recent medical journal study compared the rate of gun suicides during the ﬁrst week after people buy a gun with the suicide rate during any given week for people who do not own guns. It concluded that the rate for people who just bought the gun was 57 times higher (Garen T. Wintemute et al., Mortality among Recent Purchasers of Handguns, 341 New Eng. J. Med. 1583 (1999)). The authors took this as strong evidence that suicides could be prevented if guns had not been purchased. However, the research in criminology is more mixed. (For an extensive survey, see Kleck,supra note 8, at 265–88.) It often has to rely on rather imprecise variables, such as the number of federally licensed ﬁrearms dealers in a county to proxy for gun ownership (Lin Huff-Corzine, Greg Weaver, & Jay Corzine, Suicide and the Availability of Firearms Via the Retail Market: A National Analysis (working paper, Univ. Central Florida 1999)). 23 Kleck,supra note 8, at 269–75. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 665 implies only a small relationship in a small percentage of speciﬁcation (the relationship is even smaller than if nongun magazines are used). III. The Raw Data Fifteen states adopted safe-storage laws between October 1, 1989, and January 1, 1996, with the average law being adopted in the middle of Sep- tember 1992. 24 For the implementation dates of safe-storage laws, we relied primarily on an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,25 although this contained laws passed only through the end of 1993. The Web site for Handgun Control provided information on the three states passing laws after this date and conﬁrmed the information found in the medical journal for the earlier dates. 26 The laws share certain common features, such as making it a crime to store ﬁrearms in a way that a reasonable person would know that a child could gain use of a weapon. The primary differences involve exactly what penalties are imposed and the age at which a child’s access becomes allowed. While Connecticut, California, and Florida classify such violations as felonies, other states classify them as misde- meanors. The age at which children’s access is permitted also varies across states, ranging from 12 in Virginia to 18 in North Carolina, Texas, and Delaware.27 Most state rules protect owners from liability only if ﬁrearms are stored in a locked box, secured with a trigger lock, or obtained through unlawful entry. The data examined in this study span 1977–96 for the crime rates and 1979–96 for the accidental death and suicide rates. Most of the analysis is conducted at the state level because the county-level data are not disaggre- gated by age and only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the counties will experience an accidental gun death or gun suicide by children under age 15 in any given year. 28,29 24 The states in order of adoption are Florida (October 1, 1989), Iowa (April 5, 1990), Connecticut (October 1, 1990), Nevada (October 1, 1991), California (January 1, 1992), New Jersey (January 17, 1992), Wisconsin (April 16, 1992), Hawaii (June 29, 1992), Virginia (July 1, 1992), Maryland (October 1, 1992), Minnesota (August 1, 1993), North Carolina (December 1, 1993), Delaware (October 1, 1994), Rhode Island (September 15, 1995), and Texas (January 1, 1996). 25 Cummings et al., supra note 15. 26 See http://www.handguncontrol.org. 27 The ages for different states are California (14), Connecticut (16), Delaware (18), Florida (16), Hawaii (16), Iowa (14), Maryland (16), Minnesota (14), Nevada (14), New Jersey (16), North Carolina (18), Rhode Island (16), Texas (18), Virginia (12), and Wisconsin (14). 28 Data are available from the authors. More precisely, the data exclude accidental gun deaths for children under age 1, although it is our understanding that the number of accidental gun deaths in that category are exceedingly rare relative to even the small number of accidental gun deaths in the 1–4-year-old range. 29 We have examined the county-level data for 1977–94 used in Lott,supra note 9, but could not ﬁnd a relationship between safe-storage laws and total accidental gun deaths or suicides. Because of obvious objections to using these aggregate numbers, since only a small share of This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 666 the journal of law and economics Three of the 15 states adopting the safe-storage laws had the laws in effect for only 1 full year, 10 states for 4 full years, six states for 5 full years, and three states for 6 or more years. Because the different states have such different crime, accidental death, and suicide rates, the before-and-after rates need to be made comparable. Therefore, the simple graphs presented here will primarily compare the before-and-after rates for only the 10 states that had their law in effect for at least 4 full years, although the other groupings of states produce similar results. We will also indicate how the raw data changed during the sample for the 36 states that did not adopt safe-storage laws. Not all states experience accidental gun deaths in any given year. In 1996, for example, 12 states experienced at least one death for children under 5, 16 states for children between 5 and 9, and 32 states for children between 10 and 14. Suicides were more spread out across the states for 10–14-year- olds, with 40 states experiencing at least one suicide. As a rough method to detect any effect from the passage of the law, Figure 1 illustrates how accidental gun death rates changed over time for states with safe-storage laws for children under age 15 relative to those without such laws. The diagram provides information on per capita accidental death rates from guns and per capita accidental death rates from handguns. Handguns are examined separately because much of the public debate has focused on the possible risks of having handguns in the home. 30 Unfortunately, most gun deaths (about 56 percent) are listed as “unclassiﬁed” as to the type of weapon, but this does not pose a major problem forthecomparisonspresented here as the share of unclassiﬁed cases remains fairly constant over the period. To calculate the ratio of accidental deaths in states with safe-storage laws relative to those without the law, the yearly accidental death rate in each individual state that adopted a safe-storage law is divided by that same year’s average accidental death rate in states that do not adopt the law. The ﬁgure reports the average of these ratios for the safe-storage states. The comparison is made in this way because different states adopted safe-storage laws in different years, and we want to examine how the accidental deaths changed in the years before and after the law while making sure that we account for national trends. Year 0 in Figure 1 constitutes the year that the law was passed, and year 1 is the ﬁrst full year that the law was in effect. 31 While the states adopting accidental deaths or suicides involve juveniles, we will focus on the state-level data. The safe- storage laws are also statewide laws, although county-level data could be useful in differen- tiating the impact of these laws on different population groups. 30 Indeed, the ﬁrst agreement that President Clinton made with gun makers to voluntarily include locks was made with respect to handguns. See also, for example, Amanda Ripley, Ready. Aim. Enter Your PIN, N.Y. Times Magazine, November 21, 1999, at 82–83, which discusses the need for handgun locks. 31 The average law went into effect in early July, so the law was in effect, on average, for half a year during the year that it is adopted. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 667 Figure 1.—How accidental gun death rates for children under age 15 changed in states with and without safe-storage laws. Vertical axis: Ratio of accidental gun and handgun death rates for the 10 states that passed safe-storage laws and ended up having them in effect for at least 4 years relative to those rates in states that never had safe-storage laws in effect. safe-storage laws tended to have lower accidental gun death rates than states without the law, the ﬁgure indicates little systematic impact of safe-storage laws on accidental deaths. Following adoption, the relative rate of accidental gun deaths in states passing the laws ﬁrst falls and then rises. The rate of accidental total gun deaths in the two sets of states ends up being virtually the same at the end of the period as when the law passed. The same holds for the subcategory of handgun deaths. Despite these laws potentially being most likely to stop accidental handgun deaths, there is no obvious decline. In fact, while relative accidental handgun deaths fall at ﬁrst, the relative This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 668 the journal of law and economics accidental handgun death rate in states passing the laws almost doubles 4 years afterward. 32,33 The relative changes in suicide are shown in Figure 2, and they are cal- culated in the same way as for Figure 1. For suicides, no clear impact can be observed. The relative gun suicide rate ends up at almost the exact same level 4 years after adoption as the year that the law is adopted. Suicides from all methods (the middle curve) actually rose slightly between year 0 and year 4, but it was due to an increase in suicides by nongun methods. If a rela- tionship between safe-storage laws and suicides exists, it will have to be ferreted out by more sophisticated regression estimates, such as the ones presented in Section V. Figure 3 examines the relative violent crime rates, and it provides the ﬁrst indication that crime rates may have changed around the time that safe- storage laws were enacted. For the 10 states that had their safe-storage laws in effect for at least 4 years, the relative violent crime stopped falling when these laws were adopted and then ended up even higher at the end of the period. IV. Other Factors While very large changes can sometimes be seen in the raw data, patterns often only emerge once other factors are taken into account. As with the preceding diagrams, probably the most obvious variables to account for in explaining accidental gun deaths for children are the rates at which other nongun accidental deaths occur, as well as the rate at which other age groups 32 The Cummings et al., supra note 15, research provides evidence of a 23 percent drop in juvenile accidental gun deaths after the passage of safe-storage laws. Juvenile accidental gun deaths did decline after the passage of the law, but what Cummings et al.miss is that these accidental deaths declined even faster in the states without these laws. While the Cummings et al.piece examined national data, it did not use ﬁxed year effects, which would have allowed them to test whether the safe-storage states were experiencing a drop relative to the rest of the country. The simple dummy variable that they use is only picking up whether the average juvenile accidental death rate is lower after the passage of safe-storage laws. One potential problem with this approach is that any secular decline in accidental gun deaths would produce a lower average rate after the law even if the rate of decline was not affected by the law. Finally, because they did not break down the results by type of gun or, as we shall do later, by a more detailed age breakdown, they never observed some of the anomalies that we will show for some categories of accidental gun deaths (for example, for handguns) actually rising after the passage of safe-storage laws. In a recent interview with USA Today, Cummings stated “that, unlike Lott, he didn’t explore the possibility that gun-storage laws actually cause crime. ‘I guess I wouldn’t have, because it seems like a very implausible connection,’ Cummings says. ‘But I guess anything’s conceivable.’ ” (Martin Kasindorf, Study: Gun-Lockup Laws Can Be Harmful, USA Today, May 11, 2000, at 8A.) 33 If the base years had been made using year 1 in Figure 1 (the last full year before the safe-storage law was enacted) and 1990 in Figure 2, the differences in accidental handgun deaths for those under age 15 is truly dramatic. At the same time that accidental handgun deaths are exploding in safe-storage states (increasing fourfold by year 3 and still being 2.25 times higher in year 4), the accidental handgun death rate is plummeting in states without the law (declining by 56 percent in 1994 and 81 percent in 1996). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 669 Figure 2.—How gun suicide rates for children under age 15 changed in states with and without safe-storage laws. Vertical axis: Ratio of suicide rates for the 10 states that passed safe-storage laws and ended up having them in effect for at least 4 years relative to those rates in states that never had safe-storage laws in effect. in the population die from accidental gunshots. Since none of the safe-storage restrictions apply to people older than 17, we will use the percapitaaccidental gun death rate for people over age 19. Accidental gun deaths for those outside the age group impacted by the safe-storage law may also proxy for not only the availability of guns in the home since some of these deaths will involve parents or other adults, but also for other risk factors that might vary by state. We also ran estimates where the accidental gun death information for those over age 19 is broken down into narrower age groupings under the This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 670 the journal of law and economics Figure 3.—How violent crime rates changed in states with and without safe-storage laws. Vertical axis: Ratio of the violent crime rate for the 10 states that passed safe-storage laws and ended up having them in effect for at least 4 years relative to those rates in states that never had safe-storage laws in effect. assumption that those closest in age to the age group being studied would explain more of the variation. While there is some evidence for that hy- pothesis since these narrower age groupings for people over age 19 help explain more of the variation in juvenile accidental gun deaths, none of the results for the safe-storage laws were affected. The data allow the accidental death data to be disaggregated by age (1–4, 5–9, 10–14, and 15–19 years of age; see the Appendix for the descriptive This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 671 statistics of these variables). If the desire to access guns were the same for all age groups, one would expect that if safe-storage laws prevent access to guns, they would have their biggest impact for the youngest children. As noted earlier, the General Accounting Ofﬁce reported in 1991 that mechanical safety locks are unreliable in preventing children over 6 years of age from using a gun, 34 and there is probably little that can prevent an older teenager from doing what he wants. Yet, even if the beneﬁts are smaller for older children, it is possible that children who are even older than the ages for which the restrictions apply could experience a drop in accidental gun deaths. The general speciﬁcation that we will use is Accidental Gun Death Rateijk p b Safe Storage Law Dummy b Accidental Nongun Death Rate1jk2ijk b Accidental Gun Death Rate for Adults b Control Variables3jk4jk b State Fixed Effects b Year Fixed Effects a ,56 ijk where the Accidental Gun Death Rate is that rate for age group i in state j and year k. Besides the law dummy, the accidental nongun death rate for the same age group, and the accidental gun death rate for adults, we account for vectors of control variables and state and year ﬁxed effects. A similar approach will be used to explain how suicides by youngsters vary. We will include information on suicides for people in that age group committed by means other than guns along with suicide rates for people older than 19 years of age. Whatever might cause youngsters to attempt to commit suicide by means other than guns might also help explain the rate at which they try to commit suicides with guns. In addition, factors that determine the general suicide rate for those over age 19 might also be relevant for explaining the gun suicide rate for those under that age. It is simply not possible to use the same level of disaggregation by age for suicides as was used for accidental deaths. For example, there was only one suicide using a gun for children under age 10 in 1996. State and year ﬁxed effects would easily explain all the variation even using state-level data. The categories thus have a somewhat broader age range: one category with children under age 15 and one with adolescents aged 15–19. To try to account for differences other than safe-storage laws, in addition to the normal ﬁxed state and year effects, we incorporate an extensive data set on state-level variables. This includes 36 demographic variables, by the percentage of the population that belongs to a certain sex and race (black, white, and other) by 10-year age groupings (10–19 and 20–29 years of age). It also includes real per capita income, poverty rates, median education, unemployment, percent of families with only one parent present, state pop- 34 U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce,supra note 4. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 672 the journal of law and economics ulation and state population squared (to account for population density), as well as information on per capita unemployment insurance payments, income maintenance payments, and government retirement payments to those over age 64. Unfortunately, one variable that we do not have is the rate at which people are arrested for violating these laws across different states, although we do examine whether the violation is a felony or a misdemeanor. This inability to obtain data on enforcement is one reason why we examine how the ac- cidental gun deaths, suicides, or crime rates vary across each of the 15 states that passed safe-storage laws. The consistency of these results provides some assurance the results do not arise simply because some states enforce the law while others do not. Even in the couple of cases where a signiﬁcant effect is found for an individual state, that impact is not consistent across accidental gun deaths, suicides, and crime rates. While much of the focus of other gun laws is on the crime rate, gun laws also control the accessibility and availability of guns and, hence, might affect accidental gun deaths and suicides. Therefore, we will also account for right- to-carry laws, one-gun-a-month purchase rules, states that border one-gun- a-month states, waiting periods, and mandatory prison penalties for using guns in the commission of a crime. While one of the authors has previously examined the impact of right-to-carry laws on county-level accident and suicide rates and found no evidence of any signiﬁcant impact, it is still possible that some speciﬁc age groups might be placed at greater risk. For instance, waiting periods might impact an adult’s ability to obtain a gun to commit suicide, while it is less plausible that this would apply to suicides by younger people under 18. 35 V. The Results A. Accidental Gun Deaths The ﬁrst set of estimates use a simple dummy variable that is set equal to the portion of the ﬁrst year that the safe-storage law is in effect and then equal to one for all subsequent years. Speciﬁcations 1, 5, and 9 in Table 1 account for only state and year ﬁxed effects. The other speciﬁcations also account for all the other variables discussed in the preceding section, with the exception of the other gun control laws. The estimates are broken down in two ways, by age category (1–4, 5–9, 10–14, and 15–19 years of age, although because of space considerations this last category is not shown here) and by whether the rate of nongun accidental deaths for people in that 35 Recent editorials in medical journals have called for research on whether waiting periods impact suicides. M. L. Rosenberg, J. A. Mercy, & L. B. Potter, Firearms and Suicides, 341 New Eng. J. Med. 1609 (1999). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). TABLE1Impact of Safe-Storage Laws on Accidental Gun Deaths, by Age GroupUnder Age5Ages5–9OnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables UsedOnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables Used(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)Safe-storage law dummya8 77E7(1 228)1 05E6( 982)1 05E6( 988)1 03E6( 971)1 59E6(2 106)*1 90E6(1 69)1 78E6(1 583)1 77E6(1 581)Accidental death rate for people in age group frommeans other than guns00107( 175)000937( 154)0105(1 109)0102(1 062)Accidental gun death rate for people over 19 years of age169(2 40)*0275( 403)x2343 94 419 51 425 49 453 47 389 91 454 87 722 46 722 46Ages10–14Ages15–19OnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables UsedOnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables Used(9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16)Safe-storage law dummya3 95E7( 433)1 46E6(1 11)1 46E6(1 11)1 48E6(1 12)9 13E7( 779)7 87E7( 485)8 30E7( 511)6 43E7( 405)Accidental death rate for people in age group frommeans other than guns00018( 018)000283( 027)00584(1 021)00425( 757)Accidental gun death rate for people over 19 years of age0655( 789)6405(6 34)x2669 31 949 30 950 33 986 64 807 23 949 30 950 33 986 64Note.—All regressions are weighted tobits, where the weighting is each state’s population, and use state and year ﬁxed effects Speciﬁcations 1, 5, and 9 accountfor only ﬁxed year and state effects Not reported for the other speciﬁcations are the 36 demographic variables, state population and population squared,unemployment,poverty rate, income variables, or the ﬁxed effectsNp918aEquals fraction of year that the law is ﬁrst in effect and 1 thereafterThe two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 10% level* The two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 5% levelThis content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 674 the journal of law and economics age group or whether the accidental gun death rate for people over 19 years of age is accounted for. Despite these different combinations, it is difﬁcult to observe any evidence of reduced accidental gun deaths from the safe-storage law. Half the 16 coefﬁcients are negative and half are positive, with the only statistically signiﬁcant estimate implying that safe-storage laws increase accidental gun deaths. Some of the point estimates do imply a large percentage impact for the two youngest age groups, but the net effect on all four age groups added together is actually very small—resulting in four more accidental deaths (ignoring the even smaller estimates provided by the regressions with only the ﬁxed effects: six lives saved for those ages 1–4 years, 12 more lives lost for those ages 5–9, 12 lives saved for those ages 10–14, and 10 more lives lost for those ages 15–19). The differential pattern for different age groups also seems inconsistent with what would be predicted from safe-storage laws.36 While increases in the accidental death rate from nongun methods for people in an age group is almost always positive, it is never statistically signiﬁcant. Thecoefﬁcientsalsoindicatethatincreasingthepercapitanumber of nongun accidental deaths by one increases the number of accidental deaths by guns by at most .01. Perhaps not surprisingly, the accidental gun death rate for people over age 19 does a much better job of explaining the accidental gun death rate for juveniles that are relatively closer in age—increasing accidental gun deaths over age 19 by one per 1,000 people increases the per capita number of accidental gun deaths for 15–19-year-olds by .64 per 1,000 people. The results for the other control variables are presented for some of these speciﬁcations in an appendix that is available from the authors, but most variables are not statistically signiﬁcant. These results were robust to including other gun laws, accounting for the age at which the law applies or whether the penalty was a felony or mis- demeanor, using separate dummy variables or before-and-after trend for each state that passed the safe-storage law, year ﬁxed effects by region, lagged values of the endogenous variable, and interacting the safe-storage law dummy with the violent crime rate to see if the law produced feweraccidental gun deaths in low-crime areas. We also tried using Poisson estimates to reestimate these regressions. (These results are available from the authors on request.) The few gun law coefﬁcients that were statistically signiﬁcant ac- tually implied increases in accidental gun deaths. Taken together, these estimates provide no consistent evidence that safe- storage laws reduce accidental gun deaths. The adverse consequences of safety caps for medicine or car safety regulations do not appear to be present here, but neither are there any beneﬁts. Not only are the coefﬁcients almost 36 Consistent with the raw data, rerunning the results for accidental handgun deaths implies that these deaths actually rose after the passage of the safe-storage laws. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 675 never statistically signiﬁcant, but when they are signiﬁcant, they are more likely to indicate increased accidents after the law. In any case, the effect (if it does indeed exist) is extremely small and implies only a few more deaths a year. As noted earlier, in the description of the previous research, one possible reason for these laws not having an effect is that accidental deaths primarily occur among the not-so-law-abiding segments of society, and these groups do not appear to care very much whether a law exists regarding the storage of guns. 37 B. Suicides with Guns Our examination of suicide laws follows the set of speciﬁcations used to examine accidental gun deaths, butwithtwoexceptions:(1)theagecategories for children under 5, ages 5–9, and ages 10–14 have been combined into one group, children under age 15, and (2) the variables on accidental deaths from other sources and for people over age 19 have been replaced by the analogous variables for suicides. The estimates in Table 2 correspond to the earlier results presented for accidental gun deaths in Table 1. These results also fail to indicate any signiﬁcant change in gun-related deaths. While the coefﬁcients for both sets of results are negative, they are statistically insigniﬁcant and relatively small. The estimates for children under age 15 using the control variables imply that anywhere froma2to4.8percent drop in gun suicides from the safe- storage law, while the similar estimates for 15–19-year-olds are somewhat larger, at up to 5 percent. As with the case of accidental gun deaths, the effectiveness of the law was expected to decrease with age, not only because not all 15–19-year-olds are covered by the law, but also because of the presumed inability to actually prevent older juvenile access. Yet again, how- ever, these differences are not statistically signiﬁcantly different from zero, and they are not statistically signiﬁcantly different from each other. The estimates that come closest to being statistically signiﬁcant at the 10 percent level for a two-tailed t-test are those that account only for ﬁxed effects. Adding only the variables for the rate at which people in the age group commit suicides by other means and the suicide rate for people over 19 years of age reduces the t-statistic below one for both regressions. The other reported coefﬁcients for nongun suicides for people in these age 37 Because people might be the least likely to store their guns safely when they feel the most threatened, and the survey data provided in Section VD conﬁrms this, we also reestimated the earlier regressions for accidental gun deaths and suicides by interacting the violent crime rate with the safe-storage law dummy variable. If people are more likely to feel threatened in high- crime-rate areas, higher crime rates should be associated with smaller reductions in accidental gun deaths and suicides. The coefﬁcients are slightly more negative than reported earlier, but the results are qualitatively unchanged. Our interpretation of these results is that accidental gun deaths and gun suicides are simply not a problem in the law-abiding households who are most likely to alter their behavior. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). TABLE2Impact of Safe-Storage Laws on SuicidesUnder Age15Ages15–19OnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables UsedOnlyFixed EffectsAll Other Control Variables Used(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)(6)(7)(8)Safe-storage law dummya4.65E7(1.601)1.74E7(.403)1.84E7(.389)7.69E8(.178)4.22E6(1.330)3.67E6(1.195)3.83E6(1.248)3.68E6(1.194)Suicide rate by people in agegroup committed by meansother than guns .0285(.706).0195(.477).3598(.863).0337(.804)Suicide rate by people over 19years of age .0191(2.627)*.0276(.534)x2425.34 563.71 512.23 570.86 1,225.57 1,434.68 1,435.43 1,435.71Note.—All regressions are weighted tobits, where the weighting is each state’s population, and use state and year ﬁxed effects Speciﬁcations 1 and 5 account foronly ﬁxed year and state effects Not reported for the other speciﬁcations are the 36 demographic variables, state population and population squared, unemployment,poverty rate, income variables, or the ﬁxed effectsNp918aEquals fraction of year that the law is ﬁrst in effect and 1 thereafter* The two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 5% levelThis content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 677 groups and the suicide rate for those over 19 are all positive. However, only the suicide rate for those over 19 is statistically signiﬁcant in explaining the suicide rate for children under age 15. (The estimated values for the other coefﬁcients are available from the authors.) We then checked whether these results were robust to including other gun laws, accounting for the age at which the law applies or whether the penalty was a felony or misdemeanor, using separate dummy variables or before- and-after trend for each state that passed the safe-storage law, year ﬁxed effects by region, lagged values of the endogenous variable, interacting the safe-storage law dummy with the violent crime rate to see if the law produced fewer accidental gun deaths in low-crime areas, and using Poisson estimates to reestimate these regressions. (These results are available from the authors on request.) Unlike the estimates for accidental gun deaths, we did ﬁnd a couple of coefﬁcients that indicated that gun suicides declined after the pas- sage of the safe-storage law. However, even in these cases, the evidence clearly rejects the hypothesis that the total number of suicides, committed by all methods, would be reduced. C. Crime Rates Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot....Under the new “safe storage” laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone...sothat’s just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done....[The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork...hadapparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into the house and began stabbing the younger children in their beds, Jessica’s attempts to dial 9-1-1 didn’t do much good. Next, the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight....[T]he children’s great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, told re- porters: “If only (Jessica) had a gun available to her, she could have stopped the whole thing. If she had been properly armed, she could have stopped him in his tracks.” “Maybe John William and Ashley would still be alive,” Jessica’sunclesaid. 38 38 Vin Suprynowicz, Las Vegas Rev.-J., September 24, 2000, at 2K. There are many related stories that indicate that crimes would have been successful if the gun had been locked up or not accessible to children. Take a case in Grand Junction, Colorado (Ellen Miller, Man Faces Suspects Accused of Attacking Him after Getting Ride, Denv. Rocky Mtn. News, March 14, 2001): A building contractor, on his way home from work, picked up three young hitchhikers. He ﬁxed them a steak dinner at his house and was preparing to offer them jobs. But two of the men grabbed his kitchen knives and started stabbing him in the back, head and hands. The attackers only stopped when he told them that he could give them money. But instead of money, the contractor grabbed a pistol and shot one of the attackers. The contractor said, “If I’d had a trigger lock, I’d be dead. If my pistol had been in a gun safe, I’d be dead. If the bullets were stored separate, I’d be dead. They were going to kill me.’’ A typical example of a young person using a gun defensively is from Clearwater, Florida (Alleged Intruder Shot, in Critical Condition, Gainesville Sun, March 11, 2001): At 1:05 a m., a man started banging on a patio door, brieﬂy left to beat on the family’s truck, but returned and tore open the patio door. At that point, after numerous shouts not to break into the home, a 16-year-old boy ﬁred a single riﬂe shot, wounding the attacker. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 678 the journal of law and economics The lack of beneﬁts in the preceding sections is consistent with two pos- sible explanations: either the safe-storage laws have no impact on people’s behavior in storing or owning guns, or the laws alter the behavior of people for whom the risks of accidental gun deaths or suicides were already very low. This second explanation is consistent with what we know about the types of people involved in accidental gun deaths, but additional information on changes in crime rates can help distinguish between these two hypotheses. The speciﬁcations reported here are similar to those discussed in the pre- ceding tables, although the crime-speciﬁc arrest rates and the execution rate for murder are now included. Table 3 ﬁnds that safe-storage laws are sig- niﬁcantly related to higher rape, robbery, and burglary rates and that these effects are quite large, at least for the ﬁrst two categories—with rape and robbery rates rising by 9 percent and 10 percent, respectively. 39,40 Speciﬁ- cations using only the safe-storage law dummy and ﬁxed state and year effects or excluding the other gun control laws imply a similar pattern of results. These are surely very large changes in crime rates that occur when the safe-storage laws are adopted. However, as the survey data in the next section shows, the percentage changes in the rate at which people lock up their guns or no longer own guns after these laws are passed are even much larger. The coefﬁcients from Table 3 predict that the 15 states that had the safe- storage law in effect in 1996 experienced 3,738 more rapes, 26,724 more robberies, and 69,741 more burglaries. 41 It is possible to put a rough dollar value on the losses that result from these safe-storage laws. The National Institute of Justice has estimated the costs to victims of various types of crime, as a result of lost productivity, out-of-pocket expenses, medical bills, property loses, as well as losses from fear, pain, suffering, and lost quality of life. 42 Using our smallest estimated increase in these three crimecategories, the total annual loss to victims from safe-storage laws is about $652 million 39 Including lagged values of the crime rates as an explanatory variable does not alter these ﬁndings. The coefﬁcients for rape, robbery, and burglary still remain positive and statistically signiﬁcant, and the signs of the other coefﬁcients remain unaltered. The results for the later regressions on which the ﬁgures are based actually become more signiﬁcant and the pernicious impact of the safe-storage law more pronounced. 40 Poisson estimates were also employed for the murder and rape regressions,andthisactually implied an even stronger relationship between safe-storage laws and crime rates. The incidence rate ratio estimates were murder 1.0496 (z-statistic p 4.082) and rape 1.1048 (z-statistic p18.213). The other crime variables could not be estimated using Poisson simply because so few observations had zero values. 41 Not including the other gun control variables for a set of regressions that correspond to those in Table 3 produced a slightly different change in crimes: 3,819 more rapes, 21,000 more robberies, and 49,733 more burglaries. 42 Ted R. Miller, Mark A. Cohen, & Brian Wiersema, Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look (1996). This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). TABLE3Impact of Safe-Storage Laws on Crime RatesViolentCrime Murder Rape RobberyAggravatedAssaultPropertyCrime Burglary LarcenyAutoTheftSafe-storage law dummya0104( 372)039(1 141)092(3 357)**1056(2 823)**041(1 493)02( 059)061(2 678)**0094( 498)0052( 165)Right-to-carry lawsb02(8 88)**034(17 62)**01(3 34)039(19 52)**03(15 35)**009(3 87)*02(14 35)**007(2 99)003( 20)One-gun-a-monthpurchase rulea059( 713)132(1 808)054( 679)11( 999)136(1 430)037( 656)0057( 085)084(1 503)004( 043)Neighbor’sadoptionof one-gun-a-monthpurchase rulea233(3 855)**153(2 093)*089(1 508)00232( 029)25(3 639)**117(2 818)**081(1 662)146(3 600)024( 355)Waiting period dummy124(1 459)026( 249)046( 561)019( 333)155(1 587)086(1 456)159(2 288)*033( 578)1384(1 428)Length of waiting period in days020(1 865)0244( 925)019(1 419)023( 807)027(1 110)0155(1 716)026(2 489)*0109( 750)0628(2 564)Length of waiting period in dayssquared002(1 802)0019(1 322)0016(1 401)002(1 273)00078( 568)0016(1 939)0026(2 694)**00067( 831)0049(3 611)AdjustedR29491 9262 9068 9599 9356 9095 9238 9078 9341F-test13 026 49 13 92 12 80 16 20 11 61 21 55 11 66 17 06N994999 994 1,001 1,001 1,001 1,001 1,001 1,001Note.—The table reports the natural log of the crime rate The table uses state-level, violent, and property-crime data from the Uniform Crime Report All regressionsare weighted least squares, where the weighting is each state’s population, and use state and year ﬁxed effects Not reported are the 36 demographic variables, state populationand population squared, unemployment, poverty rate, income variables, or the ﬁxed effects All crime rates are in natural logsaEquals fraction of year that the law is ﬁrst in effect and 1 thereafterbChange in the crime rate from the difference in the annual change in crime rates in the years before and after the change in the law (annual rate of change after the lawminus annual rate of change before the law)F-test values are in parenthesesThe two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 10% level* The two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 5% level** The two-tailed test is signiﬁcant at the 1% levelThis content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 680 the journal of law and economics in 1998 dollars. If the rest of the country were to adopt similar safe-storage laws, the most conservative estimates here imply that there would be 5,070 more rapes, 23,525 more robberies, and 24,058 more burglaries. As expected, higher arrest rates and higher execution rates for murder deter violent crime, and the longer a right-to-carry law is in effect, the greater the drop in crime. 43 One-gun-a-month rules raise violent crime, although the effect on crimes other than murder are not statistically signiﬁcant. It is also interesting to see that one-gun-a-month rules are frequently consistent with increased crime in neighboring states. At the very least, concerns about crime arising from straw purchasers exporting guns to neighboring states appears to be misplaced. We then examined the effect of accounting for the age at which the law applies or whether the penalty was a felony or misdemeanor. Breaking down the effect by the age for which the law applies produces larger increases in rape, robbery, property crimes, burglary, and larceny. Treating violations as a felony rather than a misdemeanor creates a bigger increase in all the crime categories except for auto theft, although the differences are statistically signiﬁcant only at better than the 1 percent level for aggravated assault, property crime, and burglary. 44 Including the other gun control laws and regional year ﬁxed effects produces similar results. The preceding discussions examine only how the adoption of safe-storage laws change the before-and-after average crime rates. Yet, as noted earlier, sometimes such simple averages can be quite misleading. Figure 4 graphs out the estimates based on the simple before-and-after law linear and squared trends. These results indicate that the dummy variable approach underesti- mates the crime-increasing impact of safe-storage laws. The simple dummy variable in Table 3 actually found a very slight insigniﬁcant decline in violent crime. Looking at Figure 4, it is easy to see how the after-law average violent crime rates are less than the prelaw average, yet it is also obvious that violent crime rates stopped declining and started rising at the time the safe-storage law was passed. After an upward displacement in violent crime, the violent crime starts declining again but remains above what its predicted rate would have been if the law had not been passed. In a country of 270 million people, this difference of 33 violent crimes per 100,000 people would amount to 43 Each 1 percentage point increase in execution rates is associated with a 4 percentage point drop in murder rates. 44 Disaggregating the estimates down to the individual states reveals that, especially for rape and robberies, the vast majority of states with safe-storage laws experience more crime. For rapes, 14 of the 15 states adopting safe-storage laws faced higher rates, and the one state for which this was not true only had an extremely small drop (Texas experienced a .3 percent decline). The numbers are not quite as lopsided for robberies, but 11 of the 15 statesexperienced an increase. While the overall effect of safe-storage laws on aggravated assaults is not statis- tically signiﬁcant, 10 of the 15 states did experience a decline in this type of crime. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 681 Figure 4.—Comparison of the change in average violent crime rates after the adoption of a safe-storage law with the preexisting trend. over 89,000 violent crimes. The patterns for the individual crime categories were similar, and the graphs are available from the authors on request. 45 Table 4 provides more reﬁned estimates of the victimization costs of safe- storage laws. The ﬁrst part of the table calculates the difference in the number of crimes by year between the new trend as a result of the safe-storage law and what the crime rates would have been if the prelaw trend had continued. 45 The graphs also make it clear why rape and robbery rates were the only violent crime categories using the simple dummy variable to show a statistically signiﬁcant increase in crime after the passage of safe-storage laws. While all the violent crime categories increase when safe-storage laws go into effect, rape and robbery were the only categories where the crime rates rose above the previous prelaw averages. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 682 the journal of law and economics TABLE 4 Costs of Safe-Storage Laws in Terms of Higher Crime Rates Year after Passage Murder Rape Robbery Aggravated Assault Burglary Larceny Auto Theft 1 168 1,856 16,037 7,118 58,125 14,326 28,532 2 287 3,313 26,488 15,319 101,123 23,441 51,134 3 358 4,326 30,758 24,565 127,850 27,313 67,369 4 380 4,869 28,807 34,821 137,980 25,946 77,075 5 355 4,932 21,152 46,050 132,023 19,384 80,373 Average increase in victim costs a 1,070.6 399.2 235.6 688.4 176.4 9.4 26.4 Note.—The table uses the quadratic before-and-after trends and the control variables used in Table 3 The table reports the change in the number of crimes by year after the adoption of the safe-storage law a In millions of 1998 dollars, using the National Institute of Justice’s estimates The 15 states with safe-storage laws would be expected to experience 168 more murders in the ﬁrst full year that the law is in effect. The number of murders peaks in the fourth full year at 380 murders. The number of rapes and aggravated assaults is still rising 5 full years after the law is in effect, while robberies peak at almost 31,000 during the third year. Of the property crimes, burglaries show the biggest increase over the period. The total victimization costs using the National Institute of Justice’s es- timates continue rising over the period, reaching $3.4 billion during the ﬁfth year. The average yearly cost to victims over the 5 years is $2.6 billion, of which $2.4 billion arises because of increased violent crimes. There is one ﬁnal prediction about the impact of safe-storage laws on crime: after the passage of safe-storage laws, crimes should bemoreattractive to criminals in residences than in other places. Unfortunately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports do not disaggregate crimes in this manner. After contacting state law enforcement agencies, we obtained yearly data for 1987–99 for two states (California and Oregon) that show the percentage of homicides and robberies that took place in residences. While the data are very limited, Figure 5 suggests that California’s safe- storage law increased the rate at which crimes occurred in the home. While the percent of homicides and robberies exhibit no observable pattern in Oregon (a state without the safe-storage law), the California data indicate that these percentages obtained their lowest values in 1993 for robberies and 1992 for homicides, and there is a general upward trend after those dates (California enacted its safe-storage law in 1992). 46 46 Simple regressions running the percentage of these crimes committed in residences on time trends for the years and including ﬁxed state and year effects provides some additional support. An F-test for the difference in before-and-after trends equals 1.72 for homicide and 1.47 for robberies. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 683 Figure 5.—Percentage of homicides and robberies in residences in California and Oregon before and after the adoption of a safe-storage law. D. Did Safe-Storage Laws Change the Rate at Which People Locked Up Guns? While we observe an economically and statistically signiﬁcant increase in crime after the passage of safe-storage laws, a more direct tie between the passage of the laws and individuals locking up guns would be very helpful. Otherwise, it is possible that the passage of the law did not alter the rate at This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 684 the journal of law and economics which individuals either locked up or owned guns. Fortunately, several types of survey data are available. One survey sponsored by thePoliceFoundation 47 asked 2,568 people about whether they owned a gun as well as how they stored it. A total of 2,562 people answered “yes” or “no” to the question of whether a gun in the home was stored loaded and unlocked, but missing information for other questions reduced the sample size in the regressions to 2,394. The survey included a great deal of information that allowed us to measure race, how safe the individual feels at home alone, whether they have ever used a gun for self-defense, whether they have had training in how to use a gun, age, where they live, employment status, marital status, education, political views, whether a veteran, number of children, number of children under age 3, how frequently they attend religious services, religious preferences,family income, whether they have ever been arrested, sex, state codes, and infor- mation on whether the surveyor thinks that the person being surveyed in- vented the defensive gun use. Dummy variables were used to identify these different characteristics. 48 A detailed appendix of the complete list of the characteristics and their average values for those that acknowledged that they owned guns as well as those who claim that they did not is available on request from the authors. The variable for whether a gun is stored unlocked and loaded equals one when this is true and zero otherwise. Because we have a dummy variable as an endogenous variable, we will estimate logit regressions. A dummy is included for whether a safe-storage law was in effect at the time of the polling in 1994, as well as a variable for the number of years (including parts thereof) that the safe-storage law has been in effect. The results (avail- able on request) indicate that states with safe-storage laws had higher rates of households leaving guns loaded and unlocked (coefﬁcient p .69,t-statis- tic p 2.3) but that the rate fell the longer that the law was in effect (coef- ﬁcient p .1248,t-statistic p 1.646). Six years after adoption of the law, states with safe-storage laws have a lower percentage of homes with loaded, locked guns. The other coefﬁcient estimates are basically whatone would expect.People who have used a gun in self-defense or who feel the least safe are more likely to have a gun that is loaded and unlocked, but only the ﬁrst effect is statistically signiﬁcant. Men and those living on farms are also more likely to have a gun that is loaded and unlocked. Other characteristics of people 47 Police Foundation, National Study of Private Ownership of Firearms in the U.S. 1994 (1997). 48 The left-out characteristics picked up in the intercept are for an employed, married,veteran, Protestant, weekly-church-attending, white male with no education living in the open country who feels very safe at home and makes less than $5,000 per year. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 685 in this category are interesting, though less obvious: Asians, Catholics, and those making between $50,000 and $75,000. Because the decline in the rate that guns are stored loaded and unlocked in the previous regression could be due to either people with guns now storing them differently or a decline in gun ownership, we also reestimated this regression solely on those individuals that report that they own guns. Doing so produces very similar though more signiﬁcant results, with the coefﬁcient on the number of years that the safe-storage law is in effect now equalling .0995 (t-statistic p 1.995). Other survey data are also available from the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Corporation. While this survey has the advantage of being given in many different years, it can investigate only what happens to the number of guns owned and not whether guns are being stored loaded and unlocked. 49 The results imply that gun ownership rates fell by 1 percentage point per year faster after the law than they did beforehand (although the change was statistically signiﬁcant only at the 17 percent level for a two-tailed test). If true, this represents a substantial change in gun ownership. After 5 years, the level of gun ownership in these states would be expected to fall from 28 to 23 percent. There are several possible reasons for this decline in ownership, although the price of gun locks themselves does not seem particularly important. The most likely factors would be either the new possible criminal penalties for owning a gun or the increased perceptions of the riskiness of having a gun in the home given the news attention surrounding thelaw’spassage.However, differentiating safe-storage-law states on the basis of whether they make violations a felony or a misdemeanor does not appear to make a difference in explaining the drop in gun ownership. It is not immediately obvious how to measure the impact of increased perceptions of risk on gun ownership. VI. Conclusion Safe-storage laws have no impact on accidental gun deaths or total suicide rates. While there is some weak evidence that safe-storage laws reduce ju- venile gun suicides, those intent on committing suicide appear to easily substitute into other methods, as the total number of juvenile suicides actually rises (if insigniﬁcantly) after passage of safe-storage laws. The pattern across 49 There are also a couple of other problems: not all states are surveyed, and the survey was conducted only in 1977, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987–91, 1993, 1994, and 1996. Fewer people were also included in any given year, with between 907 and 1,970 people. Because the General Social Survey reports national weights, we reweighted the state-level percentages to reﬂect the composition of people in that state using the 36 demographic groupings that we have used in the earlier regressions. We regressed the percent of the population with guns on the year trends for before and after the adoption of the safe-storage and concealed handgun laws as well as all the measures of income, state population, unemployment, poverty, and demographics used in earlier regressions. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 686 the journal of law and economics ages and with regard to the type of gun is also difﬁcult to reconcile with the theory that safe-storage laws will reduce juvenile accidental gun deaths. The only consistent impact of safe-storage laws is to raise rape, robbery, and burglary rates, and the effects are very large. Our most conservativeestimates show that safe-storage laws resulted in 3,738 more rapes, 21,000 more rob- beries, and 49,733 more burglaries annually in just the 15 states with these laws. More realistic estimates indicate across-the-board increases in violent and property crimes. During the 5 full years after the passage of the safe- storage laws, the 15 states faced an annual average increase of 309 more murders, 3,860 more rapes, 24,650 more robberies, and over 25,000 more aggravated assaults. The impact of safe-storage laws is consistent with existing research in- dicating that the guns that are most likely to be used in an accidental shooting are owned by the least law-abiding citizens and thus are least likely to be locked up after the passage of the law. The safe-storage laws thus manage to produce no signiﬁcant change in accidental deaths or suicides and yet still raise crime rates because households with low accidental death risks are now the ones most likely to obey the law. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 687 APPENDIX TABLE A1 Descriptive Statistics for Endogenous Variables Variable Mean SD Min Max Accidental gun death rate for ages (N p 918): Under 5 2.62E 06 5.01E 06 0 .0000455 5–9 4.21E 06 7.31E 06 0 .0000604 10–14 .000011 .0000123 0 .0000875 15–19 .0000182 .0000211 0 .000208 Nongun accidental death rate for ages (N p 918): Under 5 .0001995 .0000788 1.10E 12 .0005212 5–9 .0001164 .0000483 0 .0003763 10–14 .0001229 .0000484 0 .0003382 15–19 .0004679 .0001598 .0000347 .0012447 Suicide rates for those under age 15 (N p 918): Gun 3.38E 06 3.47E 06 0 .0000285 Other method 2.48E 06 2.83E 06 0 .0000242 Total 5.86E 06 4.75E 06 0 .0000449 Suicide rates for those between ages 15 and 19 (N p 918): Gun .0000763 .0000426 0 .0003402 Other method .00004 .0000232 0 .0001844 Total .0001162 .0000527 0 .000431 Natural log of crime rates (N p 1,017): Violenta 5.9692 .7013274 2.68 7.979955 Murder 1.749346 .7675413 2.3 4.39 Rapea 3.412765 .4988437 0 4.9 Robbery 4.658273 .9991612 1.17 7.4 Aggravated assault 5.450054 .6910092 2 7.350902 Property 8.346207 .3342765 6.4 10.02 Burglary 6.961164 .4242595 4.65 9.8 Larceny 7.922934 .3196749 6.08 8.81 Auto theft 5.846315 .6062313 3.28 7.517467 a N p 1,010 Bibliography Ayres, Ian, and Donohue, John J., III. “Nondiscretionary ConcealedWeapons Laws: A Case Study of Statistics, Standards of Proof, and Public Policy.” American Law and Economics Review 1 (Fall 1999): 436–70. Bartley, William Alan. “Will Rationing Guns Reduce Crime?”Economics Letters 62 (1999): 241–43. Bartley, William Alan, and Cohen, Mark A. “The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis.”Economic Inquiry 36 (April 1998): 258–65. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 688 the journal of law and economics Black, Dan A., and Nagin, Daniel S. “Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?”Journal of Legal Studies 27 (January 1998): 209–20. Boor, Myron, and Blair, Jeffrey H. “Suicide and Implications for Suicide Prevention.”Psychological Reports 66 (1990): 923–30. Bronars, Stephen G., and Lott, John R., Jr. “ Criminal Deterrence,Geographic Spillovers, and the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns.”American Economic Review 88 (May 1998): 475–479. Cramer, Clayton E., and Kopel, David B. “‘Shall Issue’: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws.”Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 679–757. Cummings, Peter, et al. “State Gun Safe Storage Laws and Child Mortality Due to Firearms.”Journal of the American Medical Association 278 (October 1997): 1084–86. DeZee, Matthew R. “Gun Control Legislation: Impact and Ideology.”Law and Policy Quarterly 5 (1983): 367–79. Duggan, Mark. “More Guns, More Crime.” Working paper. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Geisel, Martin S.; Roll, Richard; and Wettick, R. Stanton, Jr. “The Effec- tiveness of State and Local Regulations of Handguns.”Duke University Law Journal 4 (1969): 647–76. Huff-Corzine, Lin; Weaver, Greg; and Corzine, Jay. “Suicide and the Availability of Firearms via the Retail Market: A National Analysis.” Working paper. Orlando: University of Central Florida, November 1999. Kleck, Gary.Targeting Guns: FirearmsandTheirControl.NewYork:Aldine de Gruyter, 1997. Kleck, Gary, and Patterson, E. Britt “The Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on Violence Rates.”Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9 (1993): 249–88. Klein, David. “Societal Inﬂuences on Childhood Accidents.”Accident Analysis and Prevention 12 (1980): 275–81. Klein, David, et al. “Some Social Characteristics of Young Gunshot Fatalities.”Accident Analysis and Prevention 9 (1977): 177–82. Kopel, David B.The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy.New York: Prometheus Books, 1992. Kopel, David B. “Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars: Lawsuits against Gun Companies and the Problem of Positive Externalities.” Paper presented at the American Criminology Meetings, Toronto, 1999. Lester, David. “Gun Ownership and Suicide in the United States.” Psychological Medicine 19 (1989): 519–21. Lott, John R., Jr. “The Concealed-Handgun Debate.”Journal of Legal Studies 27 (1998): 221–43. Lott, John R., Jr.More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). safe-storage gun laws 689 Lott, John R., Jr., and Mustard, David B. “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to- Carry Concealed Handguns.”Journal of Legal Studies 26 (1997): 1–68. Miller, Ted R.; Cohen, Mark A.; and Wiersema, Brian.Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look.Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1996. Murray, Douglas R. “Handguns, Gun Control Laws, and Firearm Violence.” Social Problems 23 (1975): 81–92. Peltzman, Sam. “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation.”Journal of Political Economy 83 (1975): 677–725. Peterson, Steven; Hoffer, George; and Millner, Edward. “Are Drivers of Air- Bag-Equipped Cars More Aggressive? A Test of the Offsetting Behavior Hypothesis.”Journal of Law and Economics 38 (1995): 251–64. Plassmann, Florenz, and Tideman, T. Nicolaus. “Geographical and Temporal Variations intheEffectsofRight-to-CarryLawsonCrime.”Workingpaper. Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1999. Police Foundation.National Study of Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States, 1994.Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1997. Rosenberg, M. L.; Mercy, J. A.; and Potter, L. B. “Firearms and Suicide.” New England Journal of Medicine 341 (1999): 1609–11. Southwick, Lawrence, Jr. “Self-defense with Guns: The Consequences.” Working paper. Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1997. Viscusi, W. Kip. “The Lulling Effect: The Impact of Child-Resistant Packaging on Aspirin and Analgesic Ingestions.”American Economic Review 74 (May 1984): 324–27. Waller, Julian A., and Whorton, Elbert B. “Unintentional Shootings,Highway Crashes, and Acts of Violence.”Accident Analysis and Prevention 5 (1973): 351–56. Waters, Robert A.The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm.New York: Cumberland House, 1998. Wintemute, Garen J., et al. “Mortality among Recent Purchasers of Handguns.”New England Journal of Medicine 341 (1999): 1583–89. Wright, James D., and Rossi, Peter H.Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms.Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986. Zimring, Franklin, and Hawkins, Gordon. “Concealed-Handgun Permits:The Case of the Counterfeit Deterrent.”Responsive Community 7 (Spring 1997): 46–60. This content downloaded from 047.044.179.026 on June 19, 2018 14:10:10 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 1 Crystal Bothelio From:City Council Sent:Tuesday, June 19, 2018 4:43 PM To:Howard Miller; Manny Cappello; Emily Lo; Mary-Lynne Bernald; Rishi Kumar; James Lindsay; Crystal Bothelio; Nora Pimentel Subject:FW: "Why Do Kids Shoot Up Schools?" From: Virginia Fujii Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2018 4:42:18 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: City Council Subject: "Why Do Kids Shoot Up Schools?" Dear Mayor and Council Members, I am not a resident of your beautiful City, but I do visit and shop in your stores. I am very disappointed to read the proposed gun legislation being discussed tomorrow night. It is unconstitutional and illogical. I offer the link below as a more thoughtful approach on to how to protect our children. John Taylor Gatto is an award winning educator from New York. Asked, after Columbine to explain why such a thing would happen, he gave a lecture that is pertinent to this discussion now. It is linked below: "Why Do Kids Shoot Up Schools?" - John Taylor Gatto on Columbine - C-SPAN - 2001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9nb7OzUIb8 Please consider the deeper issues that drive the violence. Also, please recall the historical fate of every nation whose people have surrendered their guns only to be slaughtered by oppressors with weapons. Thank you for your consideration. Virginia Fujii 2 2 I. REQUIRING INDIVIDUALS TO REPORT THE THEFT OF LOSS OF A FIREARM WITHIN 48 HOURS IS UNENFORCEABLE AND WILL ONLY RESULT IN FEWER REPORTS TO POLICE. Under the preemption doctrine a local regulation will be struck down if it duplicates state law, conflicts with state law, or enters a field wholly occupied by the state to the exclusion of local regulation, either expressly or by implication.[1] In the present case, the mandatory reporting of the theft or loss of a firearm is already required under state law following the enactment of Proposition 63.[2] This provision subjects gun owners to penalties if a firearm, which is lost or stolen, is not reported to authorities within 5 days of the time he or she knew or reasonably should have known that the firearm was lost or stolen.[3] With the enactment of Proposition 63, the state has fully and completely occupied the field regarding the reporting of lost or stolen firearms. To pass additional requirements at the local level that is duplicative and otherwise contradictory to state law will be struck down as preempted. From a policy perspective, mandatory reporting requirements may appear sound, but in practice will only result in fewer firearms being reported. This is because when coupled with the mandatory locked-storage requirements also being considered by the City, reporting a firearm as lost or stolen may expose an individual to additional criminal liability should the person have failed to secure their firearms in accordance with the ordinance. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads “[n]o person. . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” will prevent such individuals from being compelled to report the loss.[4] As a bedrock of our criminal justice system, the Fifth Amendment prohibits police, prosecutors, and judges from requiring an individual to provide evidence or testimony that could result in potential criminal charges against them (compelled speech). Governor Brown noted these complicated policy issues when he vetoed numerous pieces of legislation prior to the voters passing Proposition 63. In his veto message, Governor Brown wrote that he had vetoed similar measures in 2012 and 2013 stating “I continue to believe that responsible people report the loss or theft of a firearm and irresponsible people do not… it is not likely that this bill would change that.” Even Governor Brown’s predecessor Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill reasoning that it “could result in cases where law-abiding citizens face criminal penalties simply because they were the victim of a crime, which is particularly troubling.”[5] Given the enforcement difficulties, other jurisdictions considering similar measures have rejected them. Recently, the Sacramento Police Department reviewed identical Oakland, Berkley, and Alameda County reporting requirements, only to discover that not a single investigation, arrest, or conviction had taken place. In San Francisco, when police do try to enforce this portion of the municipal code, the cases are dismissed on constitutional grounds. One District Attorney for the County of San Francisco even stated, “I do not believe [the 1 Crystal Bothelio From:Nora Pimentel Sent:Wednesday, June 20, 2018 3:22 PM To:Crystal Bothelio Subject:FW: Mandatory Storage and Lost/Stolen Reporting I am forwarding you this one (below) to include in your pdf, since its different from what I am collecting. Thanks From: Walter Windus Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2018 2:30 PM To: Nora Pimentel <npimentel@saratoga.ca.us> Subject: Mandatory Storage and Lost/Stolen Reporting Please convey to the Saratoga City Council my opposition to this proposed ordinance. 1. This is an unnecessary ordinance since the topics are already covered by state law. 2. It is not likely to be universally enforced since it is very unlikely that law enforcement will go from house to house inspecting for violations. 3. It will make criminals out of many of the Saratoga citizens, those who are inadvertently in violation of this ordinance. 4. It will degrade if not destroy relations between the citizens and law enforcement for fear of being cited if law enforcement is contacted for another issue. Therefore the citizens will be reluctant to report crimes or act as witnesses. 5. Surely the Saratoga City Council has other more important business to consider rather than spending their valuable time on this topic. The news media has not indicated that these are a problem in Saratoga. Thanks for forwarding my comments. Best regards, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Windus 95070‐3538 Storage and Reporting of Lost or Stolen Firearms Item 2.2, June 20th 2018 Saratoga City Council Meeting Oppose, but conduct additional public meeting to solicit sensible public safety recommendations. 1. Vague requirement a. What does “reasonably should have known [of loss or theft] really mean? 2. No evidence of any benefit, but penalizes innocent victims. a. Prop 63 requires 5 days. No evidence that 2 days is better. b. US DOJ study indicates no benefit even within a 6 month reporting window. 3. Storage requirement was rejected in other communities as jeopardizing public safety. a. Risk if homeowner responds to knock on door with gun in hand or on hip. b. Home invasion or violent confrontation often occur within a few seconds*. Under ideal circumstances, a cable lock (most common locking device and included with gun purchase) takes just under 90 seconds to render firearm usable. The proposal renders self-protection and protection of others virtually impossible without any demonstrable benefit. * Sources: FBI and DOJ research Dave Truslow