Statement to Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Concerning the Gun Show Ban

February 8, 2000

Members of the Board of Supervisors:

I understand that the Board is considering an ordinance to ban possession of firearms on county-owned property.  This is a very poorly disguised attempt at preventing gun shows from happening in county-owned facilities in the future.

How many fatalities and injuries have occurred in Sonoma County because of guns purchased at gun shows here?  Keep in mind that data from other states concerning gun show sales has no applicability to California, nor do incidents from before 1991. You see, California for the last nine years has prohibited transfers of nearly all firearms, except through licensed dealers with a background check and a waiting period.[1]   Gun shows are not exempt!

On the other side of the "public health and safety" equation, how many fatalities and injuries in Sonoma County have been prevented because of guns purchased at gun shows?  The most recent research on the subject indicates that there are hundreds of thousands to perhaps more than a million civilian defensive gun uses a year in the U.S.  A survey taken specifically to demolish the Kleck and Gertz estimate of 2.45 million per year also produced an estimate of more than a million civilian defensive gun uses per year.[2]

Nordyke v. Santa Clara County (9th Cir. 1997) found that gun shows are constitutionally protected commercial free speech. To be constitutional, regulation of commercial free speech requires a substantial governmental interest, the regulation must directly advance that interest, and it must not be "more extensive than is necessary to serve that interest."[3]   This is the reason that a number of county and city governments have passed regulations such as the one you propose – to get around the Nordyke decision.  Your problem, should you decide to enact this ordinance, is that the newspaper coverage of your decision to pursue this measure clearly establishes that the goal is to subvert the right of commercial free speech.

Consider the U.S. Supreme Court decision Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), which struck down an Alabama law that provided for a minute of silence at the beginning of each school day.  Among the pieces of evidence considered by the trial court, and discussed by the U.S. Supreme Court, was the stated intent of the legislators "that the legislation was an ‘effort to return voluntary prayer’ to the public schools."[4]  Your ordinance will be in a similar position – a clear attempt to subvert the First Amendment..

There is another form of commercial free speech that happens every weekend here in Sonoma County.  It involves private parties coming together to buy and sell a very dangerous piece of machinery – one that kills more Americans every year than guns.  Unlike a gun show, there are no background checks at this "dangerous machinery show."  Indeed, I find it more likely that a drunk driver has bought a car across from the fairgrounds and killed someone with it in the last few years, than that a criminal has bought a gun at the gun show, and killed someone with it.  But I don’t see the Board making any plans to do anything about that problem.

This ordinance is a waste of time, and when the county gets sued and loses, it will also be a waste of money.

Thank you.
 

Notes:

1. Cal. Penal Code § 12076.
2. Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (Washington: National Institute of Justice, 1997), 8-9.
3. Nordyke v. Santa Clara County, 110 F.3d 707 (9th Cir. 1997).
4. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 58 (1985).