SACRAMENTO – Amid an epidemic of gun violence that kills 117 Americans a day, new findings from the California Department of Justice add to the wide body of research that show California’s nation-leading gun safety laws work – saving lives and improving public safety.

With California’s gun safety laws serving as a model for the nation, Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a Right to Safety – an amendment to the United States Constitution to ensure communities across America can determine their own gun safety laws and to enshrine fundamental, broadly supported gun safety measures into law. The Right to Safety Resolution, which calls for a constitutional convention, gets its first legislative hearing today in the Senate Public Safety Committee.

California is ranked as the #1 state for gun safety by Giffords Law Center, and the state saw a 43% lower gun death rate than the rest of the U.S. According to data from the CDC analyzed by the California Department of Justice Office of Gun Violence Prevention, California’s gun death rate was the 7th lowest in the nation and its gun homicide rate was 33% lower than the national average. Even after significant pandemic-era increases, California’s gun homicide rate for youth was nearly 50% lower in 2022 than it was in 2006.

In contrast, the rest of the U.S. experienced a 37% increase in youth gun homicide rates over the same period. The next two most populous states after California – Florida and Texas – experienced substantial increases over this same period, with youth homicide rates rising by 24% in Florida and 49% in Texas.

When comparing California’s gun death rate to the rest of the country, the trend since the late 1980s is unmistakable: more action on gun safety has resulted in less gun deaths.

“If California’s firearm mortality rate matched the rest of the U.S., California would have lost nearly 19,000 more people to fatal firearm injuries in a single decade, from 2013-2022. Tens of thousands more people would likely have been shot in this state.

“If the firearm mortality rate in the rest of the U.S. matched California’s over this same period, there would have been nearly 140,000 fewer firearm-related deaths across the nation in that decade alone, and potentially hundreds of thousands fewer gunshot injuries.”

In the 1990s, California had the third highest gun homicide rate – over 50% above the national average – and its gun death rate was substantially higher than the rest of the country. As the state added more gun safety protections, more lives were saved and the trendlines reversed.