Attorney General Bonta Releases 5-Year Strategic Plan to Reduce Gun Violence in California

As the Trump Administration guts violence prevention funding, California is building an effective blueprint for public safety

SACRAMENTO -California Attorney General Bonta today announced the final release of a Strategic Plan to Sustain California's Record Progress Against Gun Violence. Assembly Bill 1252, authored by Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, required the Attorney General's Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP) to publish a strategic plan report outlining recommendations on "new legislation, improvements to statutory implementation, and increased programmatic funding necessary to achieve sustained reductions in gun violence in California" over the next five years. The OGVP published two reports for that strategic plan:

• Part 1: Where We Are, How We Got Here, What We Need was published in April 2026. This data-focused report analyzes how California has achieved record-setting progress against gun violence, driven by progress against ghost guns and especially large reductions in firearm homicide in cities implementing community violence intervention (CVI) initiatives. Part 1 includes detailed case studies about the impact of CVI initiatives in California and provides a comprehensive foundation of data to inform gun violence prevention policy, priorities, and budgeting.
• Part 2: Strategic Plan Recommendations was released in July 2026. This report includes 74 recommendations in 18 main focus areas for policymakers, funders, and health and safety stakeholders across the state. The report describes how California could reduce firearm homicide rates by 30-50% below recent record lows within five years by implementing these recommendations, strengthening investments in gun violence prevention in state and local budgets, and uniting multiple systems around a coordinated plan for prevention, protection, and accountability.

"Since 2024, California became safer from gun violence than any other time on record. We are proving that a comprehensive, data-driven approach can transform public safety," said Attorney General Bonta. "But we are now at a dangerous crossroads. As the federal government abdicates its responsibility and guts investments in violence prevention, law enforcement, and victim care, California must continue to lead and invest in saving lives from gun violence. This strategic plan provides a blueprint for building on our progress."

The Part 2 Strategic Plan report issues recommendations in these 18 focus areas:

1. As a top overarching recommendation for this strategic plan: Invest much more in gun violence prevention specifically, and ensure scarce resources are directed first to the highest-impact strategies focused on the people and places at greatest risk.
2. Invest in Community Violence Intervention (CVI) and trauma recovery as a permanent pillar of public safety and victim care.
3. Invest in Domestic Violence Intervention and victim services, including by protecting existing victim services, launching new investments in domestic violence homicide intervention, and integrating firearm risk assessment into domestic violence response.
4. Strengthen implementation of court protection orders to improve safety outcomes for survivors, especially by improving service and firearm relinquishment compliance, and providing survivors with direct electronic access to information about their order.
5. Strengthen implementation of the Gun Violence Restraining Order (GVRO), and behavioral threat assessment and risk management interventions, especially to prevent mass shootings, hate-motivated shootings, and suicide.
6. Strengthen firearm eligibility standards to ensure people with significant histories of dangerous criminal convictions in California cannot purchase or possess firearms for a temporary period.
7. Strengthen firearm eligibility standards to ensure people with significant histories of dangerous criminal convictions, adjudications, or involuntary mental health admissions in other states cannot purchase or possess firearms in California for a temporary period.
8. Establish and fund a new California DOJ-led initiative to combat gun trafficking with state, local, and federal task force partners, with a focus on disrupting interstate gun trafficking and ghost gun manufacturing operations that fuel a majority of gun crime and violence in California.
9. Robustly implement and strengthen California's ghost gun laws, and prioritize proactive policy and enforcement efforts to address the fast-growing role that 3D printed ghost guns play in fueling gun violence.
10. Strengthen California's firearm background check processes.
11. Strengthen California DOJ's capacity to implement firearm industry oversight, consumer protection, and other gun violence prevention responsibilities.
12. Protect and strengthen restrictions on the sale and manufacture of uniquely dangerous weapons.
13. Prioritize and invest in efforts to increase clearance rates for firearm homicides and nonfatal shootings, with a focus on interrupting cycles of retaliatory gun violence.
14. Promote safe firearm storage, especially around children and teens, and promote efforts to temporarily store firearms outside the home during periods of suicidal crisis or other acute risk.
15. Promote safety in schools and through schools by expanding investments in school-based violence prevention, behavioral health services, and multidisciplinary threat assessment and management teams, and by embedding social-emotional learning and cognitive behavioral intervention into the school curriculum.
16. Implement targeted place-based strategies that seek to reduce gun violence by transforming highly impacted communities and social environments.

1. Invest in gun violence prevention research.
2. Promote impact-oriented grant-making to reduce gun violence.