Why the 101 California Street Shooting Still Resonates 30 Years Later

As the nation continues to reckon with gun violence and how to prevent it, the 1993 testimony by Steve Sposato before the Senate Judiciary Committee rings ever true to this day.

“I don’t know how many of you have taken a trip to the coroner’s office to look at the most important person in your life with five bullets in their body,” he said, carrying his 10-month-old daughter on his back. “When they’re lying there lifeless, it’s pretty painful.”

Sposato had just lost his 30-year-old wife Jody Sposato in one of the deadliest mass shootings in Bay Area history. Thirty years ago on July 1, a gunman shot and killed eight people at a law firm on 101 California Street in San Francisco.

At the time, Sposato, now a longtime gun violence prevention advocate, urged Congress to ban semi-automatic assault weapons. This eventually became federal law until it expired in 2004. Since then — and several mass shootings later — congressional lawmakers have continued to debate the issue.

In addition to federal action, a group of lawyers mobilized in response to the 1993 shooting to bolster California’s gun laws — among the strictest in the country. Currently, the state has red flag laws (which allows someone to ask the court to remove a gun from someone likely to harm themselves or others), a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and a mandate on background checks and waiting periods for firearm purchases.

Some of California’s top elected leaders have strived to show how the state could be a model for the rest of the country. This year, California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation that would ban assault-style weapons, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enshrine gun safety measures.

The California 101 St. shooting also led to the creation of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which has offices in San Francisco and Washington D.C. KQED’s Rachael Vasquez talked more about the impacts of the shooting with Laura Cutilletta, chief of staff at the Giffords Law Center.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Rachael Vasquez: I want to start with some context, because mass shootings weren’t very common when the shooting at 101 California St. happened, right?

Laura Cutilletta: That’s right. They were much less common than they are today. And this event really rocked the San Francisco community because it was just a terrible, tragic event.

This tragedy eventually led to around 100 gun laws being passed in California and a federal ban on assault weapons that was in effect for a decade. Can you tell us more about that?

So 30 years ago, California had the third highest rate of gun homicides of any state in the country. And now [the state] has the seventh lowest rate of gun-related deaths, and it’s now well below the national average for gun deaths. And if California had the same gun death rate as the rest of the nation, we would have lost nearly 16,000 more people to gunshots in the last decade alone.

The survivors of the organization got together just literally in the days and weeks after this tragedy and decided to think about what the legal community had to offer to try to prevent gun violence and save lives. And they created this organization and right away got to work on starting to pass laws at the local level in California, at the state level. In the 30 years that our organization has been in place, [it] has innovated in areas of policy and other states have copied and started new approaches that have been very effective. And it’s really in large part thanks to these survivors that turned the pain into purpose and worked in coalition with others in the state and were able to make a lot of changes.

With all of that in mind, I wonder how you make sense of the fact that so much change came out of the 101 California shooting. But today, when it feels like we hear about mass shootings so much, there’s way less, if any, action.

There’s a lot happening at the state level and even at the federal level, and I don’t know that the message has gotten out enough to the public about that. So last year, President Biden signed the first gun safety major legislation in nearly 30 years. That was a huge historic victory. We’ve had Republican governors signing gun safety laws. Unfortunately, what we still have is a way too high level of gun deaths in our country. So the epidemic itself is still raging, and there’s still so much work that we need to do.

We know a lot of communities across the state deal with everyday gun violence. What needs to happen to see meaningful change on this issue?

Fortunately, there are people that have been working for decades on the problem of community violence intervention, and there are solutions that come from the communities themselves. And these are proven solutions to reducing homicides and injury in impacted neighborhoods. California has actually been on the forefront of funding these types of programs. In 2019 and 2021, the state significantly increased its investments in a program called CalVIP (California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant Program), and that program funds these on-the-ground, community-based approaches. California has the nation’s largest state-funded program supporting these initiatives.

KQED’s Bejan Siavoshy produced and edited this audio interview.