President Donald Trump is under fire in Northern California not for the usual reasons – that Trump loathing is so intense in the region that many liberals think Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s saying Trump might someday turn out to be a good president is a

Last week, Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, blasted the White House for omitting Northern California fire victims from a request for Congress to appropriate $44 billion for disaster relief. Thompson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Trump administration was “playing political games.”

This week, the White House fired back. White House spokeswoman Helen Ferre said the administration is “fully committed to assisting the victims of the California wildfires in their hour of need,” according to a report from the Chronicle’s Washington bureau.

Ferre said the fine print on the $44 billion request showed that Golden State wildfire victims could expect to get part of $23.5 billion requested for the Disaster Relief Fund, which is overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Unlikely political couple: California Dems, Texas Republicans

But Ferre’s comments were unable to calm a larger furor over the administration’s disaster-relief request – one in which Texas Republicans and California Democrats made for a most unusual political couple, with both upset over what they see as a White House unable to grasp their needs.

Texas has sought $61 billion to help the Houston region recover from Hurricane Harvey – more than eight times the $7.4 billion that Gov. Jerry Brown sought for California wildfire relief. With damages from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico expected to be bigger than Texas’ and California’s requests combined, there’s fear that the Trump administration will balk at the federal government footing huge bills in the wake of disasters.

Texas newspapers have had days of headlines in which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have teed off on the Trump White House. Abbott said its plan was “completely inadequate,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

But a House Republican from Southern California could end up with a big say over the size of the relief package. That’s because Congress will ultimately decide how much disaster relief is appropriated, not Trump. While the president can veto a relief package, he can’t directly shape it.

That’s why Rep. Thompson and officials from Sonoma and Santa Rosa counties have already begun lobbying Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, for his help.

Only one House Republican signed the governor’s letter requesting $7.4 billion in federal aid – and it was Rep. Ed Royce of Fullerton, who represents the district just west of Calvert’s.

But after a Thompson-escorted tour of a devastated area in Sonoma County, Calvert offered reassuring words, telling the Chronicle he would work to ensure all disaster areas get “the relief they need.”

A wave of violence, legislation and litigation fueled the latest acrimonious phase of the debate about guns in California. While the issue had risen near the top of the political agenda following shootings that intensified the immigration debate, an apparently close call with mass bloodshed at the Los Angeles gay pride parade has sharpened the dispute around firearms even further. 

“The early morning arrest in Santa Monica of James Wesley Howell, 20, of Jeffersonville, came just a few hours after at least 50 people were shot and killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, though police said they had found no evidence of a connection between the events,” the Associated Press reported. “The L.A. Pride event continued as usual, albeit with increased security. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the arrest at the start of the parade and struck a defiant tone.”

Rules and rulings

In Sacramento, that tone collided with heated opposition to a new slate of measures designed to pick away at Californians’ market access to guns and ammunition. In a harsh session, “divided California state lawmakers advanced a dozen gun-control bills, including proposals to outlaw the sale of semiautomatic rifles with easily detachable magazines,” the Los Angeles Times noted. First introduced in the wake of the December terror attack in San Bernardino, the mass shooting of scores of people in Orlando “was invoked over and over Tuesday by Democrats as state legislative committees heard testimony before voting to send bills to the floor for votes,” the paper added. 

The atmosphere surrounding that legislation was charged even more highly by a Federal Appeals Court ruling this month keeping sharp restrictions in place around so-called concealed carry in California. “The 7-4 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reverses a 2014 ruling from its three-judge panel, which had struck down restrictions imposed by two California counties based on state law,” USA Today reported.

“California’s law, like those in eight other states and the District of Columbia, generally requires citizens to show ‘good cause’ before being granted a concealed-carry license. In other states, licenses are issued to most citizens without felony convictions who are not considered dangerous or mentally unstable.”

Congressional Democrats have faced a much higher hurdle to passing gun regulations than their fellow party members in Sacramento. “House Democrats with limited ability to influence the congressional agenda tried for the dozenth time Tuesday to force a gun-control vote,” as the Times reported separately. “Lawmakers used a procedural move in an attempt to get their colleagues to vote to prevent people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list from being able to purchase a gun. Given Republican control of Congress and a years-long logjam on anything related to guns, the push was symbolic.”

“But it was the second emotional and tense moment for Democrats who have repeatedly pushed for the provision and other changes to gun laws in the months since Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and other California members first stalled House floor action in the days after the San Bernardino shooting in an effort to raise the same issue.”

From morality to money

The root of the controversy over gun control has increasingly shifted onto not just moral but more deeply philosophical grounds, with proponents of tighter strictures thinking of firearms more abstractly, akin to contagious diseases, hazardous building conditions, and other generalized risks. “Gun violence is one of the top public health problems in the nation,” Boston University epidemiologist Michael Siegel argued to Wired. “If you’re in an urban area and African American, it’s probably the number one public health problem you’re going to face.”

Siegel and other such analysts cheered Sacramento’s recent passage of a $5 million allocation toward a new California Firearm Violence Research Center. The funding, according to Wired, will “train a new crop of researchers, and get one of the best gun violence data sets out there.” UC Davis violence-prevention researcher Garen Wintemute linked up with sate Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, to parse California’s copious amount of data around violence and guns, examining “the ways it has changed over time as policies shifted.”

March 6, 2013 

By Dave Roberts

California’s Democratic politicians, not content to have enacted some of the nation’s strictest restrictions on their citizens’ right to keep and bear arms, now want to do the same to the rest of the country. The Senate Public Safety Committee on a 4-2 vote (Republicans dissenting) last week passed SJR 1, a resolution urging President Obama and Congress to ban so-called “assault” weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines as well as require universal background checks.

State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, presented the resolution at the request of U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force of the Democratic Caucus. The task force is pushing for a ban on “assault” weapons and magazines along with requiring background checks for every gun sale and updating the national background check database. Thompson, in a town hall meeting in Vallejo in January, rejected the National Rifle Association’s preferred solution to preventing school shootings: providing trained personnel in schools who can access weapons in an emergency.

“Existing law in California is already much stronger than the federal law in that it regulates and requires background checks for the possession and transfer of assault weapons,” Wolk told the committee on Feb. 26. “But without a comprehensive federal approach, states will remain unprotected and vulnerable in protecting their communities from the violence associated with these weapons.”

She was backed by Amanda Wilcox, representing the 25 California chapters of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Wilcox’s daughter was killed in 2001 by a disgruntled patient who went on a rampage at the mental health clinic where the daughter worked.

“We need a comprehensive approach to address the problem of gun violence in our nation,” said Wilcox. “And this resolution is very simple. It urges the president and Congress to pursue that approach. I have family members and friends across the nation and want them to be safe. From a California perspective, we have strong gun laws. Guns do not stop at our border. We cannot do it alone. We need national solutions to reducing gun violence. And in particular a universal background check. So that people who cannot pass a background check in our state are unable to go across the border to neighboring states and buy a weapon through a private party sale.”

‘Assault’ weapons same as regular firearms

Two gun rights supporters spoke in opposition to the resolution.

Tom Pedersen, representing the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said his organization supports background checks and would like California to adopt an instant-check system. But he argued that, with “so-called assault weapons, there’s actually no real difference in the function of a firearm. A semi-automatic firearm, you pull the trigger each time, it discharges one round. And so to say that they are distinguishable between an assault weapon, so called, and a sporting firearm, that really is not the case.” An AR-15 semi-automatic rifle of the type he was discussing is pictured above.

Pedersen also argued against limiting the capacity of magazines.

“The reality of it is citizens want to have the same ability to protect themselves for the same reason that law enforcement officers want those high-capacity magazines,” he said. “The reality of it is that a woman by herself in her house at night who is 5-foot-2, and somebody breaks in who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 300 pounds, the firearm is the only equalizer there is.”

Ed Worley, representing the NRA, argued that the profusion and complexity of gun control laws has turned law-abiding citizens into criminals.

“Throughout the history of California, with the so-called gun bans that we’ve had in California, the biggest victims have been those who cannot understand what the law means,” he said. “Because laws are so arbitrary and capricious: if it has a pistol grip, if it has a magazine this size. What we’ve seen over the years is that thousands and thousands of people who have tried to comply with the law can’t figure out when the law took effect, didn’t know they had to register their gun again.

“The last case was a gentleman 69 years old, a school teacher who recently retired. He got in trouble because he tried to comply with the law. He contacted his state Assembly member and said, ‘I recently realized that I need to re-register my gun.’ So he went to his Assembly member to help with the Department of Justice and do the paperwork. He was informed that he needed to surrender his rifle and have it cut up.

“So in the state of California, what you have is an overly broad list of so-called assault weapons that don’t exist. So-called assault weapons are not machine guns. They are guns with various features on them. The federal assault weapons law that Dianne Feinstein [Democratic Senator from California] put into effect [from 1994 to 2004] had absolutely no effect. … You have tens of millions of people who lawfully possess high-capacity feeding devices, magazines of 10 rounds, usually 15 rounds. And now we have in the state of California legislation that is going to require them to be surrendered and confiscated. So what we are seeing in this resolution is trying to take the failed policies in California and trying to move them across the United States to people who have never committed a crime.”

Committee Chairwoman Loni Hancock, D-Oakland, who has introduced SB 396 limiting magazines to 10 rounds, responded that gun control legislation is effective.

“Of the 10 states with the strongest gun safety regulations, seven of them have the lowest level of gun crime, and that includes California,” she said. “Guns in homes result more often in suicide, or family members, mistakenly or not, killing or injuring one another, than they do for protection from outside people entering the home.”

Sen. Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, said he supports universal background checks, and would support Wolk’s resolution if it were limited to just that provision. Wolk said she would consider that. But Anderson joined Steve Knight, R-Palmdale in voting against it in committee.

By Dave Roberts

On Monday, two men in their late 20s attempted to break into a home in Vallejo. They fled when the homeowner grabbed a firearm and shot at them, according to the Vallejo Times-Herald. Nothing was taken from the home and police are searching for the suspects.

Vallejo’s 115,000 residents have good reason to arm themselves. The year before this Bay Area city entered bankruptcy in May 2008, it had 145 police officers. Three years later, when it exited bankruptcy, there were just 91 officers left on the force, according to city-data.com. Perhaps not coincidentally, Vallejo suffers nearly double the rate of crime as the rest of the state and country.

Vallejo was also the scene of a lively 2½-hour gun control debate Wednesday night. It was sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena (pictured nearby), who was appointed by Nancy Pelosi to head the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

Thompson likes to tout his firearms bona fides: hunter, gun owner and a tour in Vietnam with an assault rifle. But the National Rifle Association doesn’t consider Thompson a gun rights supporter, scoring him just 17 percent on gun rights votes in 2012. There’s also not a lot of gun rights support on the rest of the task force — eight of its 12 members received scores of zero by the NRA.

As a result, it’s likely that the task force’s recommendations will be in line with liberal orthodoxy, similar to what the NRA experienced in its meeting with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House on Thursday.

“We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe, and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment,” said the NRA in a press release. “While claiming that no policy proposals would be ‘prejudged,’ this Task Force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners — honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans. It is unfortunate that this Administration continues to insist on pushing failed solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems. We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen.”

Thompson’s task force will probably not recommend beefing up school security, as recommended by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who observed, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Thompson response

Thompson pretty much confirmed that in a press release response to the NRA:

“Everyone agrees our schools, movie theaters, shopping malls, streets and communities need to be safer. But we need a comprehensive approach that goes beyond just arming more people with more guns to make this happen. Closing holes in our mental health system, addressing our culture’s glorification of violence, improving background checks for everyone who buys firearms, and reinstating the ban on assault weapons and assault magazines all must be part of a comprehensive approach to reduce and prevent gun violence.”

At the town hall meeting, Thompson reaffirmed his hostility to increasing security in schools and public venues. Tom Powell, a Vallejo businessman and gun owner, advocated ensuring that one or two teachers in classrooms along every school corridor should have weapons training and an ability to access a firearm if need be.

“Just like we have marshalls on airplanes to keep them from getting highjacked,” Powell said. “The kids don’t have to know who they are. If people know there’s one or two teachers in a hallway that have a weapon and can defend the kids, they might be deterred from doing what they are doing. You’re not going to take away guns. And these things are going to keep happening, because there are crazy people out there and it’s not going to stop. You have to arm the teachers, the ones that want to do it. They can be very well trained. And maybe that will stop a few problems.”

Thompson replied, “Isn’t that responding to the last tragedy? So what do you do next? If your theory is correct, then we would arm the popcorn vendor in the theater, we would arm the salespeople in the mall. And if there’s a shootout at the football game, then we would arm the referees. Where do you stop?”

Powell responded, “We should make it OK for real citizens to get a concealed permit so that more people are armed out there. So that [would-be killers] will worry about, ‘Well, that guy might have a gun. I might not do this because he might have one, and she might have one.’ I’m not saying everybody should have a gun. I’m saying if there’s a few out there it might help.”

Thompson ended the exchange, saying, “Just for the record, I wouldn’t go to the movie if I thought eight or 10 people in there had guns.”

Applause

Powell received strong applause for his remarks. Despite the meeting being in a Bay Area city, the standing-room-only crowd packed into the Vallejo City Council chambers was split about evenly between gun rights supporters and opponents.

Thompson attempted to play both sides in his opening remarks:

“I support the Second Amendment and want to make sure that lawful individuals with clear mental health background are able to own and use firearms today and want to make sure their children and grandchildren are able to do so in the out years. But gun owners must come forward and say enough is enough. We need to stem gun violence and do it in a comprehensive manner. It’s not just guns. Guns are a very small part of it. It’s mental health issues, the culture of violence, who gets these guns and providing appropriate background checks.

“We have a lot of work to do. It’s not an easy task. It won’t be a cheap task. I want to make sure everybody is at the table and every issue is at the table. That’s why we are having these town hall meetings. We need constructive input on how to deal with this. The Second Amendment is alive and well. This is not an issue about how Americans who are law abiding and mentally stable are going to lose their guns. This is about gun safety and what we can do.”

Despite that assurance, it’s unlikely that beefed up security in schools and public venues and making it easier for law-abiding citizens to obtain concealed-weapon carry permits will be among his task force’s recommendations.

Thompson’s task force plans to issue its recommendations in early February.