Police in Fresno are calling the Sunday night shooting that left four dead and six wounded a targeted act of violence, and say they haven’t ruled out the possibility that this may have been gang related.

Police didn’t know the suspects’ ethnicity, Hall said, adding that witnesses only described seeing flashes of light as the shots were fired. Police haven’t been able to rule out whether the shooting was related to gang violence.

The suspects were armed with what appeared to be semiautomatic pistols, Hall said. Investigators were going door to door looking for security cameras in the neighborhood, he said.

The Sacramento Bee reported the shooting was at least the second fatal gun attack in Fresno Sunday. A man in his 20s was shot dead early in the day. Police didn’t say whether the incidents could be connected.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the shootings, but the man who represents Fresno in Congress knows it’s time to call for a gun control law already in place in California, and that clearly didn’t prevent this shooting from taking place.

We have passed meaningful bipartisan gun safety legislation this year in Congress that Sen Mitch McConnell refuses to bring up in the Senate.

— Rep. Jim Costa (@RepJimCosta) November 18, 2019

Costa is almost certainly referring to HR8, a “universal background check bill” passed by the House but not voted on in the Senate. The thing is, California already has a universal background check law in place, and not just for firearms. Under California law, every ammunition purchase is also supposed to go through a background check. If this was an act of gang violence, then the suspects are likely regularly evading the state’s drug laws as well as its gun laws. We’ll see if this is prediction holds up when police make arrests, but I suspect that the guilty parties are going to be known to police and prosecutors because of previous run-ins with the law, and ineligible to legally own firearms in the first place.

How would a federal universal background check law work any better than California’s universal background check law? I don’t think Rep. Costa could tell you. We must “do something”, and if you don’t agree with his proposal then you must not care much about violent crime at all, at least in his view.

Another view in California, however, is that the many initiatives in the state over the past few years to reduce the prison population have led to an increase in violent crime, and the answer isn’t another gun control law aimed at legal gun owners but putting the most violent offenders behind bars for as long as the law allows.

It’s a certainty that more gun control bills will soon be introduced in the state, and with an anti-gun supermajority in the legislature and the anti-gun governor Gavin Newsom ready to sign whatever gets to his desk, there’s no telling how much further lawmakers will soon go in stripping residents of their right to keep and bear arms. As long Rep. Costa and his like-minded colleagues get their way and keep passing laws aimed at legal gun owners and not the violent offenders known to law enforcement and neighbors alike, California’s criminals are likely to feel increasingly emboldened to act out as they did in Fresno and the state’s crime rate is likely to continue to trend in the wrong direction.