California cities and counties have imposed 1,000-foot gun store buffers after mass-casualty shootings, Los Angeles County and Monterey Park among them, and they still have the laws on their books unchallenged. Moving toward that goal on Tuesday, the Goleta City Council passed an urgency ordinance that temporarily pauses new firearms and ammunition retailers to give city staff time to research rules and regulations to set a buffer between gun shops and preschools.
At issue currently is Goodland Guns, which moved next-door to Here We Grow preschool on Hollister Avenue in August, causing a citywide uproar. While regulations on buffer zones exist, they only apply to kindergarten through 12th-grade schools. The temporary pause would not apply to Goleta’s two existing gun shops, including Goodland Guns.
The preschool has not gone unscathed. Owner Heather Robbins said on Wednesday that enrollment at the Hollister location dropped to single digits and no one enrolled for the fall, which is typically their busiest time. “Enrollment at this location was already slow going,” Robbins said, “but with this added barrier we may not survive.” Robbins said she was talking with her landlord about her 10-year lease, but the stress was taking a toll on her staff as well as financially for her Turnpike location, which is full.
“I’m really sad this is happening, but I hope it makes change in that buffer zones are important whether a school is public or private,” Robbins said.
At the council meeting on Tuesday, a public speaker pointed out that Goodland Guns had been next to the Rainbow School, a Head Start location, the Goleta Community Center, and bus stops to schools for many years without issue. Dan Ashton, the owner of the gun store, said he’d drawn 1,000- and 600-foot buffers and found that they excluded 94 percent of commercially zoned parcels. While the city might limit his competition, he found the procedures anti-gun and a “thinly veiled” gun ban.
L.A. County and Monterey Park enacted their ordinances after a shooting at a ballroom in Monterey Park that killed 11 people in 2023. The 72-year-old gunman then drove to another ballroom, where a young man whose family owned the dance hall tackled him and wrested the gun away. Both jurisdictions followed the same path Goleta is taking, first enacting a temporary ordinance before codifying the buffer zones and greater regulation of gun dealers.
Goleta’s urgency ordinance required a four-fifths vote, and the council passed it unanimously. It will pause new firearms retail licenses for 45 days — with a potential for another 10-month extension if necessary — to give city staff time to research land-use compatibility near schools, childcare facilities, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. Operational safeguards and public noticing are also on staff’s to-do lists. With regard to the Second Amendment, the city cited 2017’s Teixeira case in which the Ninth Circuit held that location restrictions and separation requirements to sensitive uses were allowed as long as access to firearms was ensured.
“We are going to step back and think about where it does make sense, where are the best locations” for gun stores, said Councilmember Stuart Kasdin, in whose district Goodland Guns now resides. “This won’t be a ban on guns in the city.”
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