WHEN a politician proclaims victory, the wise reader reaches for the fine print. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is proclaiming something close to it. On September 26th he signed ten new gun-safety bills into law, declaring that the state is ’#1 in gun safety’ and that its gun death rate reached its lowest level on record in 2024—49% below the rest of the nation. The boast, unusually, is checkable against a body of data the administration is only too happy to supply.
The package itself is a mixture of the sweeping and the minute. Two bills by Catherine Stefani, a Democratic assemblymember from San Francisco, tighten the procedures around protective orders and set up a voluntary firearm-storage programme, letting owners park guns with licensed dealers or other custodians. Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan’s AB 2047 ventures into newer territory, requiring 3-dimensional printer blocking technology. Buffy Wicks, Mike Gipson, Jesse Gabriel and Blanca Pacheco authored the remaining assembly bills; senators Jesse Arreguín and Melissa Hurtado rounded out the ten with measures on safety certificates and prohibited persons.
The most striking measure is the one with the most ambition and the least track record. AB 2047 restricts the sale or transfer of 3D printers unless they carry a state-approved ‘firearm blueprint detection’ capability designed to block known gun files, and creates penalties for knowingly helping someone defeat the system, according to coverage of the bill’s passage. It is the state’s answer to ghost guns—unserialized weapons assembled at home—which have vexed police in a way no background check can reach. Gun-rights groups see a different animal: a censorship regime administered through firmware, certain to be tested in court and perhaps easier to defeat in software than on paper.
Mr Newsom’s office frames the package as an exercise in marginal gains on an already accomplished system. The bills improve enforcement of existing firearm prohibitions, expand safe-storage tools and tighten reporting to the California Department of Justice, including better access to firearms trace data. They also direct more behavioural-health services towards young people exposed to gun violence and extend the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant Program, which funds community-based work with those most likely to shoot or be shot.
The administration’s case rests heavily on gun violence restraining orders (GVROs), which allow courts to remove firearms from people judged to be a danger to themselves or others. The law is ten years old this year, and officialdom has grown fond of it. In its first three years the orders were used to prevent 58 cases of threatened mass shootings, the governor’s office says. Between 2021 and 2024 the number of longer-term GVROs issued each year more than doubled; in 2024 alone California courts issued them against 1,727 individuals found to pose a significant danger.
Awareness of the orders is treated almost as a public-health campaign in its own right. Since 2025 the state has run Reduce the Risk, an outreach effort led by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, publicising the nine protection orders California law makes available. Officials say the campaign has conducted more than 130 trainings and connected Californians with more than 700 resources, reaching millions in total. A new Local Resource Connector, an interactive tool, points residents to courts, support services and community organisations that can help with filings.
Then there are the statistics, brandished with evangelical zeal. Both the Giffords Law Center and Everytown for Gun Safety rank California No. 1 nationally for gun-law strength. Firearm homicides reported by California law enforcement fell 19% in 2025 compared with the previous year, the governor’s office says, and the firearm homicide rate for young men and boys was nearly 50% lower than in the rest of the nation. San Jose, Bakersfield, Fresno and San Diego are credited with leading the 50 largest American cities in reducing gun violence victimisation from 2021 to 2025. The administration also offers a counterfactual: nearly 160,000 lives could have been saved nationwide over the past decade if every state matched California’s gun death rate.
Two figures buried in the same release complicate the triumphalism, albeit at the margins. Recoveries of ghost guns as crime guns fell 17% in 2025 and are down 37% since 2021—real progress, but also a reminder of how recently the problem metastasised. More awkwardly, 42% of firearms recovered and traced in California in 2025 originated from out-of-state dealers. Strict laws in Sacramento create arbitrage in Nevada and Arizona; a state’s arsenal is only as tight as its neighbours’ shop counters.
Attribution, in any case, is harder than the press release suggests. America’s gun violence fell across most of the country over the same period, and California’s decade-long investment in violence interruption coincided with a national cooling after the pandemic-era spike. Correlation between the strictest statute book in the union and one of its lower death rates is suggestive, not conclusive; California is also younger, more urban in its gun-control politics and richer than many of the states it is measured against. The honest claim is not that Sacramento has solved gun violence, but that a state which tried everything has more to show for it than states which tried little.
The likelier test of the new laws is narrower and more legal. The 3D-printer measure anticipates a technology war—state-approved detection software versus hostile firmware patches—that no legislature can fully see coming. Gun-rights litigants, meanwhile, have a restless Supreme Court and a running start. Mr Newsom’s tenth signing ceremony on the subject will not be his last; nor, very probably, will the lawsuits that follow.