Keeping Guns from People Who Shouldn’t Have Them

Gun sales in California continue to rise and according to the Attorney General’s office, there were close to a million guns sold last year. And of all the people who applied for a background check in 2014, fewer than 9,000 were denied. Less than one percent. In a report released last week by California’s state auditor, a program to recover guns from people prohibited from owning them is running way behind -- by thousands of cases. It’s an issue that keeps coming up because of mass shootings in Isla Vista, Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, and last night in Louisiana, where suspects in those cases were known to have mental health issues. KCRW's Steve Chiotakis speaks with Kate Wheeling who wrote about this backlog in the latest issue of Pacific Standard.