California Firearms History
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California's firearms history is one of those subjects that should be required reading for anyone who wants to argue about gun laws — on either side of the fence. Most people enter that conversation somewhere around 1994 and act like the story starts there. It doesn't.
California's first gun control law came in 1854 and had nothing to do with violence in the gold camps. The legislature passed a law prohibiting Chinese immigrants from carrying firearms. This was explicit racial policy — the same legislature that disenfranchised Chinese residents from most civil protections used the law as a further mechanism of exclusion.
This pattern — using firearms regulation as a tool of racial exclusion — didn't start or end in California, but the state's history documents it plainly. The same thread runs through the Mulford Act a century later. It's worth sitting with that the next time someone frames gun control as a purely progressive cause.
The Mulford Act was explicitly designed to end it. Don Mulford, the Republican assemblyman from Oakland who authored the bill, made no secret that the Black Panther Party were the target.
And Ronald Reagan signed it. The man whose name gets invoked constantly in Second Amendment arguments signed the bill that ended open carry in California — because he didn't like who was doing the carrying. Your carry rights and my carry rights have always been more complicated than the bumper stickers suggest.
Unlike most states that entered the union with explicit right-to-bear-arms language in their constitutions, California's 1849 Constitution and its 1879 revision both omitted any such guarantee. That omission is not an accident. It has defined California firearms jurisprudence ever since.
This is why California keeps winning at the circuit level even when the laws seem obviously unconstitutional to the rest of us. The legal architecture was built from the ground up without a state-level right — everything flows from that. Idaho's constitution has explicit language. California's doesn't. That gap explains about 60 years of courtroom outcomes.
I saw no reason why anyone would want to carry a loaded weapon on a public street. — Governor Ronald Reagan, 1967, on signing the Mulford Act
File that one away for your next range conversation about which party has always been the defender of gun rights. The answer is: neither, consistently, when the politics cut the other way.
For those of you who carry or have gone through any kind of permitting process — how much of what you know about California's gun laws did you actually learn before you had to, versus after something directly affected you?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team
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