“The laws that have been passed only disarm law-abiding citizens and prevent them from being able to defend themselves,” DeLuz said. 

Via San Francisco Chronicle: 

California’s firearms laws, already among the nation’s toughest, have been further stiffened by legislators and voters in the past year with bans on high-capacity gun magazines and the sales of guns with so-called bullet buttons that enable speedy reloading, and a requirement, to take effect in 2019, of background checks for buyers of ammunition.

And as firearms advocates challenge those laws in court, lawmakers are considering further measures that would ban gun possession on school grounds and limit purchases of rifles and shotguns to one per month, a restriction that already applies to handguns. But one of the Legislature’s leading supporters of gun control said Wednesday that without congressional action to stem the free flow of weapons throughout the country, there’s not much more the state can do.

“We have tightened our laws but we don’t have closed (states’) borders,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. “Until Congress acts and addresses what is a national issue in a country awash in guns, we’re going to see these horrific tragedies.”

Whatever lessons can be drawn from the gun deaths Wednesday of three victims and the shooter at a UPS warehouse in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, and the wounding of a congressman and two police officers in Virginia, Wiener said, they do not show a need for more guns in the world’s most heavily armed nation.

But Craig DeLuz of the Firearms Policy Coalition, a Sacramento organization that has sued to overturn some of the recent state laws, said the restrictive measures enacted by both California and the city of San Francisco had obviously done nothing to prevent the bloodshed, and may even have encouraged it.

“The laws that have been passed only disarm law-abiding citizens and prevent them from being able to defend themselves,” DeLuz said.

San Francisco has enacted some gun ordinances that go further than the state laws — one, which survived a court challenge, requires handgun owners to keep their weapons disabled or stored in locked containers. But Wiener, a former city supervisor, said the expansion of state laws has left little room for further local regulation.

Read more here.