A new Office of Gun Violence Prevention + Voters are confident in California elections

Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert!

CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL LAUNCHES NEW OFFICE OF GUN VIOLENCE PREVENTION

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday unveiled the Department of Justice’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a first-in-the-nation unit which the attorney general says is dedicated to responding to the epidemic of gun violence.

Bonta, a gubernatorial appointee who is running for a full four-year term in November, announced a nationwide search for the office’s first director.

According to the attorney general’s office, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention will examine factors such as firearm availability and effective resources for crisis prevention, in order to reduce the harm caused by firearms.

“This moment of crisis demands more than thoughts and prayers — we need action now,” Bonta said in a statement. “That is why as California Attorney General, I am doubling down on California’s gun safety efforts.”

Though California has some of the nation’s strongest gun control laws, and also among the nation’s fewest gun deaths, in 2020 more than 3,400 Californians died from gun violence, according to Giffords Law Center Managing Director Laura Cutilletta.

“California requires more coordinated expert leadership and a statewide resource dedicated to breaking down silos across different agencies and borders, cutting through red tape, and helping communities implement new resources to stop gun violence,” Cutilletta said in a statement.

Establishing an Office of Gun Violence Prevention appears to be a family project for the Bontas.

The attorney general’s wife, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, had introduced AB 2253, a bill that would have created such an office; that bill died in suspense.

Assemblywoman Bonta said in a statement that gun violence has hit home close to the Capitol, with a mass shooting happening just blocks away earlier this year.

“I will continue to push for gun violence to be recognized as a public health crisis to develop a health-based approach to ensure that our communities have the resources available to uplift them from the root causes of gun violence,” she said.

CALIFORNIANS CONFIDENT IN ELECTION PROCESS, SURVEY SAYS

Despite a plethora of efforts to cast doubt on the outcome of recent elections, Californians are by and large confident in the state’s electoral process, according to a recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California.

In PPIC’s September survey, 63% of likely voters said that they have either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the way that votes are cast and counted in the Golden State, according to a recent blog post on the topic.

“This is the largest share ever recorded in PPIC Statewide Surveys and demonstrates a strong rebound in opinion from record-low levels measured in September 2019. Previously, confidence in California’s electoral system had declined each time we asked this question from 2004 to 2019, but it has been on the upswing since September 2020,” according to the post.

However, there exists a strong partisan divide among those who believe that state elections are fair and those who do not. While 58% of Democrats and 39% of independents are confident in the system, just 14% of Republicans are.

Though there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud has occurred in California, half of likely voters are at least somewhat concerned that it is too easy for people who are ineligible to vote in California elections to do so. Again, one’s politics appears to play into this, with 32% of Democrats believing it’s too easy to commit voter fraud compared to 85% of Republicans.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Let’s stop this nonsense. Stop reading the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal. Stop listening to these CEOs of these big corporations that have been destroying this planet, making it uninhabitable, that are sending us off a cliff. ... It’s time to grow up. It’s time to call these folks out. It’s time to take these guys on on Fox News. It’s time to take these guys out in these editorial board rooms that have been subsidized and are wholly owned subsidiaries of these special interests that don’t have your interests at heart.”

- California Gov. Gavin Newsom, delivering closing remarks at Climate Week NYC

Best of The Bee:

• Trump backer who plotted bombing Democratic HQ in Sacramento blames beer for “huge mistake,” via Sam Stanton.

• When will this spike in mortgage and credit card interest rates end? Maybe early next year. But not anytime soon, the experts said Wednesday, via David Lightman and Hanh Truong.

• These days, Bill O’Neill is careful when he talks to strangers. A chat at a store, or on a camping trip, can quickly veer off in the wrong direction. So now if he’s asked, O’Neill just says he works in county government and tries to change the subject. He knows what happens when he tells people he’s an election official, via Stephen Hobbs.

• Californians are losing a lot of their buying power this year, as inflation remains a problem and government stimulus aid disappears. Nevertheless, the state’s economy continues to thrive and is moving toward surpassing Germany as the world’s fourth-largest economy. Those are among the key findings of the new UCLA Anderson economic forecast released Wednesday, via David Lightman.

• The California Public Employees’ Retirement System performed worse on average than other large U.S. public pension systems over the last decade, missing out on billions of dollars in potential earnings, Chief Investment Officer Nicole Musicco told the system’s Board of Administration this week, via Wes Venteicher.