THE Protection of Lawful Commerce Arms Act, which was signed into law in 2005 by President George W. Bush, is still the biggest obstacle to passing federal gun regulations in the U.S..
That was the consensus of a panel of six policy experts who spoke Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. The PLCAA gave gun manufacturers and sellers immunity from lawsuits, essentially slamming the courtroom doors shut in cases of illegal gun industry conduct.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta moderated the panel discussion, which included representatives from local, state and national groups working on gun policy reform. They agreed that the PLCAA skews the legal system in favor of the gun industry, but they also highlighted the effectiveness of locally attainable reforms.
The PLCAA was a response to litigation and huge settlements with the gun industry that followed the shooting of White House press secretary James Brady, who was wounded during the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
Kris Brown is now the president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, the nation’s oldest gun violence prevention organization.
“There were too many elected officials who were happy to take the National Rifle Association money and then pass a bill like PLCAA that purported to stop all litigation against gun manufacturers,” Brown said.
There are now 10 states that have passed legislation that allow certain cases to proceed under state law against dealers and upstream manufacturers. Those cases will lead to the discovery of new evidence about how these manufacturers are targeting our children, she said, including being willfully blind to who is selling and buying guns.
The speakers proceeded to share several eyebrow-raising statistics about gun violence in the U.S.
“Five percent of gun dealers in this country are responsible for 90% of the guns recovered in crime,” said Brown. “And by the way, we have more gun dealers in this country than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined.”
In a 2024 poll commissioned by Brown’s organization, a vast majority of Trump voters, 73%, support strengthening background checks for purchasing firearms. A majority of Americans, 74% of all voters and 69 % of Trump voters, support temporarily limiting access to firearms for individuals in crisis.
A broad public health issue
In Alameda County, gun violence is the leading cause of death in children, said Joe Griffin, executive director of Youth Alive, an Oakland nonprofit focused on youth intervention and leadership. He spoke of gun violence as a broad public health issue.
“Living in a community with high risk of violence for at least five years has impacts on your health throughout your life course,” Griffin said. “That means you’ll have higher risk of chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes. Violence prevention and intervention is also a workforce development issue. It’s a housing issue. It’s an education issue.”
Two-thirds of mass shootings in the U.S. involved some element of domestic violence, said Julia Weber, a gun violence prevention consultant who worked on state policies that remove firearms from the home in domestic violence cases. She said California law trains child custody mediators, people who have direct contact with parents who are arguing over custody and visitation, about risks associated with access to firearms and how to reduce those.
“One of the things we did in California is we changed the law regarding licensing of hairdressers, so they had to learn about domestic violence,” Weber said. “Because that’s often who clients might confide in, right?”
State and local reforms show results
In 30 years, California went from having the highest firearm mortality rates in the nation to having the lowest, said Bonta, who credited several progressive state policies including the first-of-its-kind state Office of Gun Violence Protection, which he started. The office established systems that support the seizure of firearms from dangerous individuals, the prosecution of firearms trafficking cases, and the defense of California’s various gun laws.
The firearm industry is not subject to federal consumer safety regulations, said David Hogg, co-founder of a student-led violence prevention group March for Our Lives. Hogg is a survivor of the deadliest high school shooting in American history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
“Toy guns are actually more regulated, because they’ve got to have the orange thing on the end,” he said. “So that means that if you buy a gun in most states in this country, it does not have to pass a drop test — that if you drop it, it could go off.”
In 2018, Nikolas Cruz, a former student who had been expelled from the school, killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen others. Hogg said that under federal law, the 19-year-old shooter was not old enough to purchase a handgun, but he could purchase an AR-15.
Hogg and his fellow classmates lobbied legislators in Florida to pass a red flag law in a matter of weeks. That law allows law enforcement to temporarily confiscate the guns and ammunition of someone who is believed to pose a significant danger.
“The police were called to his house over a dozen times the year before the shooting, and he repeatedly threatened to shoot up my high school,” he said. “We passed the red flag law in a Republican trifecta state where so many people said it would not be possible, that has since been used over 20,000 times to disarm people that are at risk to themselves and others,” he said.
“We had to go out there and scream and demand action and scare the hell out of a lot of politicians,” Hogg said. “No matter how corrupt a politician is or how ethical they are, the only thing that all of them care about is staying in power. They will give you as much damn lip service as possible, but until you say, ‘You better get your damn resume ready because we’re coming for your job,’ they don’t care.”
In spite of all that you’re seeing on the news, we are making progress on this, and that is a very hard thing to say. … A better day will come. One day school shootings and gun violence will be left in our history books and not in our headlines.
David Hogg, MARCH FOR OUR LIVES co-founder
Bonta raised the question of what states and local communities can do today to fill the vacuum left by the federal government. President Donald Trump’s administration has not only loosened regulations on devices like gun silencers, but $811 million in violence prevention funding has been wiped out overnight, he said, including support for Oakland’s Youth Alive program run by Griffin.
“The federal government provides almost a quarter of funding for all community-based organizations,” said Griffin, adding that Oakland saw a 30% decrease in homicides last year and is on track for the same reduction this year. Griffin pushed for more collaborative research between academic partners and communities impacted by gun violence, like a program his group is doing with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
“One of the biggest problems we have is that we can’t tell our own stories through our own data,” he said. “We don’t understand how to analyze it. We’re not even part of creating the research questions.”
Hogg suggested a state tax on firearms sales specifically earmarked to research. He said that in 2020, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $25 million researching gun violence.
“Sepsis kills about the same number of people every year as guns,” he said. “It gets over a billion dollars a year in research funding from the federal government.”
Brown assured the audience that gun violence is 100% preventable.
“What it often boils down to is the combination of policy and enforcement, and locking up the gun in the home,” she said. “I just wish that more Americans across this country understood that what we hear on the news about gun violence is not actually what gun violence in America is really all about.”
“We’ve had homicides actually decline to record lows, including in Washington, D.C. I might add, which has a 30-year low in homicides,” said Brown.
“In spite of all that you’re seeing on the news, we are making progress on this, and that is a very hard thing to say,” said Hogg. “Do not fall into the trap of the self-fulfilling prophecy of cynicism and negativity that tells us the best that this country has to offer is behind us and not ahead of us. A better day will come. One day school shootings and gun violence will be left in our history books and not in our headlines.”