California leads in gun safety, ranking #1 again

Strong gun laws save lives. California has reduced its gun violence rate by adopting nation-leading gun safety laws. If the gun death rate in the rest of the U.S. matched California’s over the past decade, there would have been nearly 140,000 lives saved and potentially hundreds of thousands fewer gunshot injuries, according to the California Department of Justice’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Every life lost or threatened by a gun is one too many. That’s why California was the first state in the nation to adopt a “red flag law” in 2016. This law builds off a bedrock of available protection orders – 9 in total – that prohibit firearm possession for people subject to orders ranging from domestic violence to workplace harassment. In the first three years of their existence, these protection orders were used to prevent 58 cases of threatened mass shootings. There have been significant increases in utilization of protection orders– increasing by 118% – from 2020 to 2023.

Get the latest news about California’s protection orders, gun safety laws,
and other information related to gun violence prevention.