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Legislation requiring police to track and regularly inventory firearms was introduced in the California Legislature Thursday.
SB 1185, introduced by Sen. Jerry Hill, would require law enforcement agencies to have a written procedure to account for all their guns, including a way to account for and document the guns and update that accounting when they are lost or stolen, the senator said.
“These bills will bring greater accountability to police firearm security and transparency to the use of surveillance as a crime-fighting tool,” Hill said in a statement.
“I look forward to working with law enforcement and my colleagues in the legislature to enable greater oversight in these areas. Both have been the focus of growing public scrutiny and concerns.”
There have been a number of widely reported incidents in the state in which firearms stolen from officers played a role in crimes. Perhaps the most notorious involved the fatal shooting of Kate Steinle at San Francisco’s Pier 14 in 2015.
A bullet from a gun stolen from the vehicle of a Bureau of Land Management ranger ricocheted and killed Steinle. The stolen gun had found its way into the hands of an undocumented immigrant who was later acquitted of murder in the case.
In another case, Abel Esquivel was shot and killed in San Francisco near 26th Street and South Van Ness Avenue Aug. 15, just days after the theft of a .38-caliber revolver belonging to officer Marvin Cabuntala.
California law does not require law enforcement agencies to periodically inventory their firearms, according to Sen. Hill’s office. The agencies must report acquisitions within 10 days and must report guns that are destroyed or somehow disposed of.
However, there are no requirements that the agency report lost, stolen or missing guns, though law enforcement officers must report a lost or stolen gun to their employer or the local police agency within five days, the senator’s office said.
There also is no requirement for law enforcement agencies to set rules on gun tracking or to regularly report the results to the Department of Justice, though some do so voluntarily, according to the senator’s office.
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With less than 1% of the guns that we have in the USA (USA civilians have around 350 million guns), Canada tried a total gun registration program. It cost them several Billions of dollars (US) to set up and operate the program and in spite of their best effort and a far more cooperative public, the result was utterly useless. In the entire history of the program, not one gun-crime was ever “solved”, not one criminal was ever convicted from tracking info. The database of gun-owners and guns was always largely out of date and every time they tried random audits it was determined that at best the database was 30% accurate.
In the USA with 350 million guns and a highly uncooperative public, any sort of gun registration program is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive and even less accurate.
The FBI cannot even keep track of tens of millions of convicted felons who are not allowed to possess any guns. The government has all the laws it needs, but at all levels, none of our law enforcement agencies or prosecutors actually bother to enforce the existing laws.
For example, the huge percentage of all gun sales require a Federal form 4473 to be filled out and submitted to the FBI. Even the Obama administration said there were millions of cases each year where known felons lied on this form in an attempt to purchase a gun. This is a Federal and Sate felony punishable by at least 5-15 years in prison. And yet, the Obama administration only even arrested a couple dozen of these felons and only a few were prosecuted.
We have all the laws ans systems we need, what we don’t have is the law enforcement and prosecutors willing to actually enforce those laws.
Fix that and you will solve the huge bulk of the problem.