Attorney General Bonta: California Hits Historic Lows for Gun Violence, Our Work and Investments are Saving Lives but We Stand at a Crossroads

Thankfully, we have a plan

SACRAMENTO -California Attorney General Rob Bonta, together with gun violence prevention leaders and advocates, today announced the release of A Strategic Plan to Sustain California's Record Progress Against Gun Violence: Part 1. Assembly Bill 1252, authored by Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, directs the California Department of Justice's Office of Gun Violence Prevention to produce a report to the Legislature outlining a five-year strategic plan to reduce gun violence. This Part 1 report documents how California has achieved its lowest rates of firearm death, firearm suicide, and firearm homicide on record, driven in part by historic investments in gun violence prevention strategies. This report establishes a data-driven foundation to guide policy, priorities, and budgeting, and identifies four priority funding recommendations to sustain California's record-setting progress. It also highlights that California is at a critical juncture, as the strategies that helped drive record reductions in California are now grappling with devastating federal funding cuts and declining or expiring state and local investments.

"This report is both celebratory and cautionary. Without sustained investment in gun violence prevention, we risk losing the momentum we have built - at a cost that will ultimately be measured in human lives," said Attorney General Rob Bonta. "California has achieved something genuinely historic. In recent years, California became safer from gun violence than any other time on record. This progress was not an accident. California's progress was built on a foundation of strong gun safety laws and ghost gun reforms, accelerated by historic - but now fast-declining - levels of state, local, and federal investment in community violence intervention initiatives, protective order and firearm relinquishment programs, and other targeted efforts to build gun violence prevention capacity where it is needed most. The data in this report makes clear that where those investments were made, lives were saved - often quickly and dramatically. We cannot lose momentum now."

"This report shows what's possible when a state commits to reducing gun violence and provides a clear roadmap for sustaining that progress," saidKrystal LoPilato, Policy Advocacy Director at Everytown for Gun Safety. "California's nation-leading, historic gains are the result of unwavering leadership, strong laws, and targeted investments in CalVIP grants and firearm relinquishment programs, alongside efforts to combat gun trafficking and address evolving threats like 3D-printed ghost guns. The next step is clear: continue and strengthen these investments to meet emerging challenges and keep saving lives."

"California has long been a leader in addressing the deadly intersection of domestic violence and gun violence, and while we have made progress, there is still more work to be done," said Grace Glaser, External Affairs and Policy Analyst, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. "The Partnership is committed to ongoing work to support survivors and create a California free from domestic violence and gun violence. We are grateful for Attorney General Bonta's continued focus on these pervasive issues. Together, we can save lives by increasing survivors' access to services that promote their safety and healing, and by keeping guns out of the hands of people who cause harm."

"The CalVIP program has made Bakersfield a safer community. Through the work of prior grant awards, we saw a 70% reduction in shootings and homicides," said Bakersfield City Manager Christian Clegg. "With that foundation in place, this new cohort will not only allow our community partners to enhance this critical work but also allow our research partners to inform the field on best practices that correlate to both community-wide reductions and individual client outcomes. The CalVIP program is advancing best practices that can benefit all communities."

In February 2026, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published final mortality statistics for 2024 based on death certificates filed for U.S. residents in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This data confirms that in 2024, California achieved the state's lowest firearm death, firearm suicide, and firearm homicide rates on record in CDC data collected since 1968. Historic reductions in firearm homicide also drove California's overall homicide rate to its lowest level on record in CDC data. In addition, it was found that California was one of three states that achieved record low firearm homicide rates in 2024, after reducing statewide firearm homicide rates by 35% in three years. Provisional data indicates that these historic reductions continued in 2025, despite destabilizing federal actions.

California has been making much more significant progress than the rest of the nation on average: As recently as 2010, a child under 18 was more likely to die from bullet wounds in California than in the rest of the U.S. on average. By 2024, a child in the rest of the nation was nearly three times as likely to die from bullet wounds as a child in California.

Vital gun violence prevention programs are facing significant state and local funding cuts at the same time that the federal government is walking away from its role in funding gun violence prevention. As a result, many of the programs that helped California achieve historic reductions in gun violence are, or soon will be, grappling with severe cuts to funding, staffing, and lifesaving services. Those same programs and initiatives have helped California:

• Drive transformational reductions in firearm homicide, with many California cities recording record low homicide rates and over 50% reductions in homicide since 2021.
• Cut firearm homicide rates by more than half (52%) for young Hispanic men from 2021 to 2024, and by 48% for young Black men.
• Cut firearm death rates for children under 18 to about one-third the rate recorded in the rest of the U.S. on average.
• Open a record large safety gap between California and the rest of the U.S. for rates of firearm death, firearm suicide, and firearm homicide.

To sustain this record-setting progress amid federal funding cuts will require sustained and expanded state and local investments. It will also require strategic focus to ensure scarce public resources are targeted effectively on bolstering public capacity where the federal government has abdicated its role, and on data-driven intervention strategies focused on prevention and protection for the people and places at highest risk. Informed by a foundation of data, this report identifies four urgent state and local funding priorities for achieving sustained reductions in gun violence:

1. Invest in community violence intervention (CVI) and trauma recovery services with a strategic focus on the people and places at greatest imminent risk.
2. Invest in domestic violence intervention and victim services, including new, CalVIP-modeled programs focused on individuals at highest risk of domestic violence homicide in the communities most impacted by domestic gun violence.
3. Invest in protective order implementation and firearm relinquishment compliance by renewing funding for the expiring Firearm Relinquishment Grant Program and funding a 21st Century protected person information portal that gives survivors direct access to information about their own protective order case.
4. Invest in investigating and disrupting gun trafficking and ghost gun manufacturing by funding a new California DOJ-led task force to leverage more state and local partnerships and fill the vacuum left by the federal government's devastating cuts to U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) capacity. These investments are needed to address the growing majority of crime guns recovered in our state traced to ghost gun and interstate gun trafficking sources.

LEARN MORE: On Thursday, May 7, 2026, from 10 AM - 11:30 AM, the California Department of Justice's Office of Community Awareness, Response, and Engagement (CARE) will host a virtual webinar to discuss this new report, "Community Briefing: California Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Report - Sustaining Progress and Protecting Investments". This free webinar is open to the public, register here for the participation link.

Here is a copy of the report.