Report: California Saw Huge Increase in Gun Ownership Over Last Decade Despite Strict Gun Laws
Ownership more than doubled between 2008 and 2018
BY: Stephen Gutowski and Charles Fain Lehman\
FreeBeacon.com
March 9, 2019
Despite some of the nation’s toughest laws, the number of gun owners in California has more than doubled over the past ten years, according to new data released Friday by the state Department of Justice.
The state of California maintains a one-of-a-kind database of known gun owners, the Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS). APPS combines data on firearm transactions from two different state sources, the Dealer Record of Sale (DROS) database which tracks all transfers made by gun dealers and the Automated Firearms System (AFS) which includes the subset of guns the state requires to be registered, to compile a list of all individuals who legally purchased or were transferred a firearm in California.
Operated continuously since 2006, the program’s goal is to identify and seize the weapons of individuals prohibited from owning a gun under state law.
Every year, the California Department of Justice provides a report to the state legislature documenting the number of individuals who have had their guns reclaimed using APPS. That report also makes public the number of individuals actually in APPS, a rough measure of the total number of gun owners in California.
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