SAN JOSE, Calif. — San Jose is on the verge of becoming the first city in the nation to require gun owners to carry liability insurance and pay a fee aimed at reducing gun violence.
More than two years after Mayor Sam Liccardo introduced his proposal for these novel gun control measures, the San Jose City Council on Tuesday night will take a final vote on the controversial regulations.
“Anyone hoping that Congress will act to better protect Americans from the scourge of gun violence will be waiting a very long time,” Liccardo said in an interview. “It’s incumbent on local communities to deploy new approaches to tackle this problem because it’s not getting solved by the current approach.”
If approved, the measures — which include substantial revisions from the mayor’s initial proposals — are set to take effect at the end of August. However, that could be delayed by legal challenges, which Second Amendment advocacy organizations have been threatening from the start.
“We’ve opposed this ordinance and will continue to oppose it,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Foundation for Gun Rights, which sent the city a cease-and-desist letter in July. “If the San Jose City Council actually votes on and passes this ridiculous ordinance, our message is clear and simple: See you in court.”
Liccardo first proposed the new gun control measures in the wake of the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting in which four people, including two San Jose children, were killed after a gunman cut through a security fence and opened fire at festivalgoers. Then, following the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest mass shooting at a Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in San Jose last summer, the mayor unveiled a new gun control plan to finally put the proposed policies into action.
Under the proposed ordinance, all San Jose residents who own a firearm must maintain a homeowner’s, renter’s or gun liability insurance policy that specifically covers losses or damages resulting from “any negligent or accidental use of the firearm.”
In addition, San Jose gun owners will be asked to pay an annual fee of between $25 and $35 to a nonprofit organization that will be created to manage the funds and use them to provide a broad range of services to residents who own a firearm or live in a household with someone that does. Those services might include suicide prevention programs, domestic violence services, mental health and addiction services, and firearm safety training, according to the city’s ordinance.
The organization, which would be a new nonprofit launched for this sole purpose, is being created by a wide group of representatives that include health care executive Reymundo Espinoza, Stanford professor Dr. Julie Parsonnet and nonprofit leaders like Esther Peralez-Dieckmann, executive director of NextDoor Solutions to Domestic Violence.
“By bringing together all those different perspectives, we get to look at this from a public health standpoint and in the end, make our community safer,” said Peralez-Dieckmann. “Whether you’re pro-guns or anti-guns, no one can argue that we have substantial injury in our community and substantial issues that need to be addressed.”
The nonprofit will use records provided by the Department of Justice to send letters to all gun owners in San Jose asking them to pay the annual fee and then give them a form that will show proof of payment and allow them to fill out their insurance information. Gun owners will be required to carry or store a copy of the paperwork with their firearm, according to the mayor.
Those who fail to adhere to the city’s new rules could face temporary forfeiture of their firearm or in certain situations, a civil fine. San Jose Police Chief Anthony Mata said previously that officers will not be seeking out offenders but if they come across a firearm during their normal course of duty, they’ll ask the owner for proof of payment and insurance.
Individuals exempted from the ordinance include sworn, active reserve or retired police officers, people who have a license to carry a concealed weapon, and low-income residents who are exempt from paying court fees because of their financial state.
The city’s new plans for the gun owner’s fee differs significantly from the narrative the mayor had been touting for the previous two years, namely that San Jose would require gun owners to pay back taxpayers for the public costs of gun violence such as police responses, ambulances and medical services.
During the city’s vetting process of the mayor’s proposal, Liccardo said the city pivoted to the nonprofit-based fee model because officials felt it would most directly reduce incidents of gun violence and better withstand legal challenges.
“We’ve taken great effort to ensure that we could craft something that will survive judicial scrutiny, and I think it’s better, frankly,” Liccardo said. “The data is overwhelming from multiple studies that the mere possession of a gun in a home dramatically increases the risk of the occupants to death by homicide or suicide and injury by shooting.
“So our work in reducing gun violence should be focused on serving folks who live in households where guns are owned and providing the services that they choose to take to help themselves.”
Like most gun control measures, San Jose’s ordinance has elicited outrage from gun owners and advocates.
Mike Fournier, longtime San Jose gun owner and hunting enthusiast, said the proposed measures punish the wrong group of gun owners, calling it the city’s latest attempt to “rip people off.”
“The bad guys aren’t going to do nothing,” Fournier said. “Most of them got ghost guns anyway so what the hell is it going to do to tax us? We’re not the bad guys.”
Although the City Council unanimously voted in July to move forward with crafting the measures, at least one member of the council will be voting against the final ordinance.
Councilwoman Dev Davis, who is running for mayor, said the measures still feature “too many unknowns” and that she felt the city’s limited time and resources could be better spent ensuring full enforcement of laws the city already has on the books, such as getting ghost guns off of the streets and educating gun owners on the city’s safe storage regulation.
“If we’re going to do something — and I agree we need to do something — we need to do the right thing,” she said, “because doing something that would be the wrong thing takes resources away from something that could be effective.”
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