Los Angeles Looks to Expand Gun Regulation

Los Angeles is looking to follow in the footsteps of two Northern California cities that enacted gun bans on possessing large-capacity ammunition clips that have stood up to Second Amendment challenges so far.

The Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office revised a proposed ordinance to mirror large-capacity magazine bans in San Francisco and Sunnyvale that have withstood Second Amendment challenges in two Northern California District courts, Deputy City Attorney Brian Sottile said.

The Sunnyvale case is being appealed.

The revised Los Angeles proposal would make possessing large-capacity magazines a misdemeanor one year after the ordinance’s adoption and give owners of the clips 60 days to surrender them, with several exceptions for law enforcement, museum collections and for magazines that hold 10 or less rounds of ammunition for firearms purchased before Jan. 1, 2000.

Critics of the Northern California bans have argued that millions of Americans legally own guns with high-capacity magazines and may need them at times for self-defense.

The City Council’s Public Safety Committee asked the City Attorney’s Office to return within 30 days with exploration of further exceptions for gun hobbyists and to make sure to address all issues that likely will be challenged in court.

Councilman Mike Bonin, who is on the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, said he wants to move forward with the ordinance to help put a stop to the “epidemic of death and gun violence in this county.”

“This is about preventing murder in our neighborhoods and preventing death in streets,” Bonin said, pointing to the use of high-capacity magazines in the killing of five people at Santa Monica College last July and the killing of a TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport in November.

The sale and transfer of high-capacity clips is a crime in California, but people can still legally own them.

According to the city’s draft ordinance, more than half of mass-shooting incidents within the past three decades involved large-capacity magazines, including the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting massacre in December 2012, in which a gunman wielding a high-capacity assault weapon killed 26 people, including 20 children.