Loaded with hate: Bill to take guns from those convicted of hate crimes passes committee

California lawmakers are trying to fix an anomaly that affords criminals convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes a special protection to still own guns, despite the fact that people convicted of 40 other types of misdemeanors—including battery, threats and stalking—can’t wrap their hands on a firearm until a decade after their conviction.

Assembly Bill 785 was written by Los Angeles Assemblyman Byron Jones-Sawyer and is characterized as patchwork for a glaring loophole in California’s penal code. It aims to bring misdemeanor hate crimes in line with dozens of other offenses by barring those convicted of owning a gun until 10 years after the fact. When Jones-Sawyer testified before the California State Senate Public Safety Committee June 6, he stressed that recent events in the news make it impossible to ignore forces at work around the country.

“There are too many examples of what a firearm can do in the hands of hate,” he said, referencing the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre in Charleston, S.C., the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., and the gun-toting rampage in San Bernardino, Calif. Jones-Sawyer added that catching a hateful ideologue at the misdemeanor stage of criminal behavior is paramount, since the actions tend to escalate over time.

Testifying in support of the bill, Amanda Wilcox of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence said that the horrible headlines in recent months are not new. Wilcox recalled the killing spree unleashed on a Stockton schoolyard in January 1989, in which five small children were killed and 15 were critically wounded. The slayings were committed by Patrick Purdy, a man Wilcox said had a deep-seated hatred of South Asian immigrants. While that claim was contradicted by some authorities at the time, what’s known for sure is that Purdy walked into an elementary school that day and trained his AK-47 on Vietnamese and Cambodian children between the ages of 6 and 9.

Wilcox’s other example, mass shooter Buford Furrow Jr., is much clearer: Furrow is a confessed white supremacist who opened fire on the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granda Hills, Calif., in 1999. The carnage left one dead and five wounded.

“Obviously, extreme hate and firearms are a bad combination,” Wilcox told committee members.

Last year, the FBI reported a 67 percent increase in hate crimes against Muslim Americans in 2015, along with a higher rates against African-Americans, Jewish Americans and members of the LGBT community.

Public Safety Committee member Hannah-Beth Jackson was aware of the trend. For her, AB 785 is an easy vote. “It’s tragically very appropriate that we do this,” she said.

The bill passed unanimously and will next be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Sawyer-Jones summed up that morning his hopes for AB 785. “This bill can not undo the past,” he said, “but it can disarm those who subscribe to hate.”