Morro Bay City Council passes 3 gun safety measures. Here’s what they do
Morro Bay’s City Council has adopted three firearm safety measures designed to prevent gun violence and improve community awareness about proper use of weapons.
At a Sept. 14 meeting, the council supported increasing training and education for police and civilians on gun violence and safety, closing a “safe storage loophole,” and pursuing legislative advocacy, Councilmember Dawn Addis said in a press release.
The council had considered other measures, such as adding a gun buyback program, but those proposed policies were not adopted.
Community trainings will include firearm safety education for teachers and students at Morro Bay High School, as well as “active shooter response” meetings for the community, among other programs.
The new safe storage ordinance — formally adopted at the council’s Tuesday night meeting — requires residents to store guns at home in a locked container or disable the weapon with a trigger lock unless the gun is carried “on the person” or within close proximity and control to readily retrieve it.
The safe storage municipal law is modeled after a San Francisco law determined to be constitutional.
Gun initiatives come in response to mass shootings
Addis brought forward the gun safety discussion “not long after the Virginia Beach shooting at a Public Works building where 12 people were murdered in September 2019.”
“The Morro Bay Council had been slated to hear the original staff report in March of 2020, just after the second anniversary of the Parkland school shooting where 17 people were killed and 17 more were injured,” Addis wrote in a staff report. “However due to the COVID pandemic, the council was not able to hear the original recommendations until April 2021, with the staff report coming back in September 2021.”
“We practically commemorated the two-year anniversary of the public works building shooting in Virginia Beach,” Addis said in the release. “It’s so upsetting that our actions continue to fall on the anniversary of people losing their lives. This is a hard issue, but an urgent one for our Central Coast communities.”
Addis added: “There have been active shooters, some resulting in tragic deaths in our county, and those to the north and south. No one is immune from gun violence. It’s a hard issue, but an urgent one. For our council to show bravery by taking this issue seriously gives me tremendous hope that other local communities will too.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 9:00 AM.
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