Claim: California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate" since the 1990s.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Antonio Villaraigosa
text: the "citywide crime-rate drop to the lowest level since 1956, the total number of homicides fall[ing] to a 38-year low. Gang homicides were down more than 24 percent in 2008." However, former Chief of Police Daryl Gates argued against this statistic, citing a trend toward lengthier prison sentences for career criminals as the reason for the change. In fact, crime fell by 43 percent across California between 1994 and 1999. The figures are also disputed by Patrick Range McDonald and Professor Andrew Karmen, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Karmen stated that, adjusting for population, the Los Angeles murder rate

title: Crime in California
text: per 100,000 population. Murders in Los Angeles have decreased since the peak year of 1993, when the homicide rate was 21.1 (per 100,000 population). On 12 September 2018, a shooting rampage was witnessed in Bakersfield, where a man killed five people and then took his life as well. The mass shooting is considered to be the third deadliest gun violence in the US in 2018. As one of the fifty states of the United States, California follows common law criminal procedure. The principal source of law for California criminal procedure is the California Penal Code, Part 2, "Of Criminal Procedure."

title: Stockton, California
text: record high of 71 homicides in 2012 before dropping to 32 for all of 2013. Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones credited 2013's drop in the murder rate to Operation Ceasefire, a gun violence intervention strategy pioneered in Boston and implemented in Stockton in 2012, combined with a federal gun and narcotics operation. On January 17, 1989, the Stockton Police Department received a threat against Cleveland Elementary School from an unknown person. Later that day, Patrick Purdy, who was later found to be mentally ill, opened fire on the school's playground with a semi-automatic rifle, killing five children, all Cambodian or

title: California Firearm Violence Research Center
text: California Firearm Violence Research Center The California Firearm Violence Research Center is a forthcoming research center the California legislature approved to fund on June 16, 2016. The center will live within the University of California and will be the first publicly charted center in the United States. Garen Wintemute and Senator Lois Wolk led the proposal to create the center. With access to California's gun violence data, the center will investigate policy efficacy, links between gun violence and alcohol abuse, and more. California's annual death rate related to gun violence has dropped 20% since 2000, despite an unchanged national rate.

title: California Firearm Violence Research Center
text: California Firearm Violence Research Center The California Firearm Violence Research Center is a forthcoming research center the California legislature approved to fund on June 16, 2016. The center will live within the University of California and will be the first publicly charted center in the United States. Garen Wintemute and Senator Lois Wolk led the proposal to create the center. With access to California's gun violence data, the center will investigate policy efficacy, links between gun violence and alcohol abuse, and more. California's annual death rate related to gun violence has dropped 20% since 2000, despite an unchanged national rate.

title: Universal background check
text: the study period, firearm suicide rates were 10.9 percent lower in California but a similar decrease in non-firearm suicide was also observed. The study found no net difference between firearm-related homicide rates before and during the study period. The study authors identified a number of possible reasons for the null finding, including inadequate reporting of criminal records or other disqualifying information to background-check databases (especially pre-2000); a failure by sellers to conduct the background check as required by law; and the small number of persons affected by the California law. In a 2017 survey, a panel of 32 scholars of

title: Oakland, California
text: reported 131 homicides, the highest number since 2006, when 148 killings were recorded. Since 2012 there have been continued decreases in various categories of crime, including homicides. In 2013, there was a 33% decline in homicides from the previous year, allowing Oakland to record its lowest homicide count since 2004. Aggravated assaults were down 10%; and rapes declined by 27%, the lowest level of that crime in eight years. In its crime statistics released for the year 2016, the Oakland Police Department reported a total of 93 murders. That total for 2016 still constitutes a 29% drop in homicides when

title: Crime in the United States
text: been 185,718 homicides from use of a firearm and 291,571 suicides using a firearm. Despite a significant increase in the sales of firearms since 1994, the US has seen a drop in the annual rate of homicides using a firearm from 7.0 per 100,000 population in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000. In the ten years between 2000 and 2009, the ATF reported 37,372,713 clearances for purchase, however, in the four years between 2010 and 2013, the ATF reported 31,421,528 clearances. According to a 2004 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, looking at the period from 1981 to 1999, the

title: Thousand Oaks, California
text: decline. In 2015, there were 1.05 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, up from 0.99 in 2014. Overall, the city experienced an one percent crime decrease between 2014 and 2015. Petty theft was the most-reported crime category in 2013, accounting for 40% of all crimes. On the night of Wednesday, November 7, 2018, at 11:20 p.m. (local time), a mass shooting occurred at the local "Borderline Bar & Grill", when a man forcefully entered the venue during a weekly country event. Police reported multiple casualties and several injured attendees had to be transported to nearby hospitals. According to an eyewitness, the

title: Oakland, California
text: of the city's elected officials are known to be Democrats. Substantial progress has been made in reducing the city's historically high crime rate. Gun crime is primarily concentrated in certain poor minority neighborhoods with nearly all homicides committed by guns. Oakland's crime rate had begun to escalate during the late 1960s; and by the end of the 1970s, during the drug wars, the city's per capita murder rate had risen to twice that of San Francisco or New York City. The primary factor in the rising crime rate has been the dramatic increase of street narcotics sales and use since

title: Gun violence and gun control in Texas
text: between 2007-2009. For the period 1976-2005, two thirds of total homicides in Texas have been committed with firearms. The year with the most gun homicides was 1991 with 1,835 and has steadily been declining since then and now total firearms homicides account for less than 1,000 per year. The rate of firearms homicides per 100,000 people in Texas had declined to around 4 in the year 2000, but has risen since, to nearly 6 in 2005 (see chart). According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2014, measuring the number of deaths due to injury by firearms per 100,000 of the

title: Universal background check
text: an effective tax on guns and can prevent less affluent Americans from purchasing them, and that this disproportionately affects poor minorities who live in high-crime urban areas. A study published in October 2018 conducted by the Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) at UC Davis and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found no change in firearm homicide or suicide rates in the ten years following California's 1991 implementation of comprehensive background checks. The study's control group used firearm and non-firearm mortality data for 32 states that did not implement major firearm policies during the period from 1981-2000. In

title: 10-20-Life
text: these acts even though they qualify, a reason must be written and filed into the court records. According to the Florida Parole Commission (FPC), in 2000, there was a 26.4% decrease in violent, gun-related crime compared to 1998. Florida's "Index Crime" rate for 2000, which is based on a variety of different crimes, had dropped 18% from the previous year, and had reached its lowest level in 28 years. According to the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), by 2004, violent gun crime rates had fallen 30% since 1998, and the Index Crime rate had reached the lowest in 34 years,

title: Three-strikes law
text: violent crime began falling almost two years before California's three-strikes law was enacted in 1994. The study argues that the decrease in crime is linked to lower alcohol consumption and unemployment. A 2007 study from the Vera Institute of Justice in New York examined the effectiveness of incapacitation under all forms of sentencing. The study estimated that if US incarceration rates were increased by 10 per cent, the crime rate would decrease by at least 2%. However, this action would be extremely costly to implement. Another study, "I'd rather be Hanged for a Sheep than a Lamb: The Unintended Consequences

title: Crime in California
text: Crime in California This article refers to crime in the American state of California. In 2008, there were 1,265,920 crimes reported in California, including 2,142 murders, 8,903 rapes and 1,080,747 property crimes. In 2004, the California Board of Corrections reported 1,279,758 bookings, or administrative records of those arrested, in jails throughout California. In 2014, 1,697 people were victims of homicides. 30% of homicides were gang-related, 28% were due to an unspecified argument, 9% were domestic, and 7% were robbery related. The rest were unknown. In 2010, Los Angeles reported 293 homicides. The 2010 number corresponds to a rate of 7.6

title: Gun control
text: determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms." Many gun control advocates cite Australia as a case of successful gun control, but opposers of this legislation argue differently. According to studies, Australia's violent crime and gun crime had been falling since the early 90s. After the gun buyback, the crime dropped at exactly the same rate, prompting questioning if it was the buyback that caused the drop in crime, or if it would have continued without confiscating 26,000 firearms. A 2007 study found evidence that gun control laws passed in Austria in 1997

title: Crime in California
text: staff, 79,431 were sworn officers (defined as those with general arrest powers). In 2008, California had 217 police officers per 100,000 residents. The death penalty (also known as capital punishment) is applied in California. General: Crime in California This article refers to crime in the American state of California. In 2008, there were 1,265,920 crimes reported in California, including 2,142 murders, 8,903 rapes and 1,080,747 property crimes. In 2004, the California Board of Corrections reported 1,279,758 bookings, or administrative records of those arrested, in jails throughout California. In 2014, 1,697 people were victims of homicides. 30% of homicides were gang-related,

title: Garen Wintemute
text: are only a dozen researchers in the United States who study this subject, including him. He has funded this research in part through more than $1 million of his own money. In 1987, he published a study on accidental gun deaths among children in California, of which 88 occurred between 1977 and 1983. The same study found that in about one-third of incidents, the shooter did not know the gun was loaded or real. At a press conference to announce the study's results, multiple real guns like those involved in the accidental deaths were placed next to toy lookalikes; few

title: 2012 California Proposition 36
text: the law in its first two years of enactment. A 2001 study by criminologists Marvell and Moody found that homicide rates increased following the passage of Three Strikes Law. The authors argued that criminals, even when committing relatively minor crimes, were more motivated after the law to murder victims, witnesses, or law enforcement personnel in order to avoid apprehension and the mandatory harsh sentences. They found that the law would increase the total number of homicides in states enforcing three strikes laws by approximately 17%. A study published in 2012 by John Sutton focused more on the law’s effects on

title: Los Angeles
text: 2nd, 3rd and 4th supervisorial districts. In the California State Assembly, Los Angeles is split between fourteen districts. In the California State Senate, the city is split between eight districts. In the United States House of Representatives, it is split between ten congressional districts. Los Angeles experienced a significant decline in crime in the 1990s and late 2000s and reached a 50-year low in 2009 with 314 homicides. This is a rate of 7.85 per 100,000 population—a major decrease from 1980 when a homicide rate of 34.2 per 100,000 was reported. This included 15 officer-involved shootings. One shooting led to