Legislation is appearing at both the state and national level as local politicians respond to the shootings and stabbings that took the lives of six UC Santa Barbara students on May 22.
U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara), California Assembly member Das Williams (D-Santa Barbara), and state Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) are all putting their names on pieces of legislation that tie together mental illness and gun ownership.
Capps is co-sponsoring a bill introduced on May 29 by her House of Representatives colleague U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena): the Promoting Healthy Minds for Safer Communities Act.
According to a press release from Capps’ office, the legislation would strengthen and improve mental-health services, intervention efforts, and research on mental illness with respect to violence; provide tools to study and understand the epidemic of gun violence; and keep guns away from those people shouldn’t have them, while maintaining firearm ownership rights.
Capps told the Sun that the legislation lays down a framework to put laws in place, and is only a start down the right path. She said it would take some funding to implement what’s laid out in the act, but Democrats first have to get it through the House.
Capps said the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force—formed by House Democrats after the Sandy Hook shootings in Newtown, Conn.—of which she and Thompson are both a part has been working on the recently introduced legislation for quite some time.
“We don’t draft legislation over night,” she said. “It’s a bill to introduce an idea, a plan of action. We have not dealt sufficiently with the juxtaposition of the arenas of guns and mental health … the conversation has begun and, unfortunately, we have an example of why it’s needed.”
Assemblymember Williams said the legislation he’s working on for the California Legislature is a direct result of what happened in Isla Vista on May 22, but it wasn’t his first thought after the tragedy.
“I didn’t assume legislation would be appropriate under the circumstances,” Williams said.
Once he realized that the suspect’s parents tried to stop the violence from occurring, but had no legal avenue to do so, he felt that he could take an “appropriately targeted approach” through legislation.
Jackson and Williams are co-authoring a bill that would allow concerned family members and friends to alert law enforcement when a loved one is perceived to have the potential to commit violence, and enable authorities to investigate and possibly prevent them from buying firearms. Williams added that all determinations would ultimately be up to the judicial system to decide.
This article appears in Jun 5-12, 2014.