Gun control isn’t stopping Californians from owning firearms, new study says

California may have some of the nation’s most restrictive gun control laws, from bans on assault rifle sales to mandatory background checks for ammunition sales, but that isn’t stopping Golden State residents from buying firearms.

A quarter of Californians live in a house with a gun, according to a new survey.

The survey, published by the peer-reviewed medical journal BMJ in the magazine “Injury Prevention,” also says that one in seven Californians, an estimated 4.2 million people, owns a firearm.

Researchers reviewed the 2,558 responses to the California Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which was collected in the fall of 2018.

The average number of firearms per gun-owning household in California was five, the survey found, for an estimated statewide total of 19.9 million guns in the Golden State.