{"id":439526,"date":"2026-08-21T16:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/439526\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T16:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:26:10","slug":"in-ca-cities-turners-outdoorsman-is-a-top-source-of-crime-guns-calmatters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/439526\/","title":{"rendered":"In CA cities, Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman is a top source of crime guns- CalMatters"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Aaron Mendelson<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""Several\"
\n\t\t\t\tHandguns on display at a gun shop in California on July 12, 2022. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters\/CatchLight Local<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by The Trace<\/a>, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.<\/a><\/p>\n

This story was published in partnership with LAist<\/a> and KVPR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman on Mohawk Street in Bakersfield, California, sits on a busy intersection across from an oil drilling site. Over the past three years, this sporting goods store sold more than 16,000 firearms \u2014 and also appeared hundreds of times during criminal investigations as the source of guns found at crime scenes.<\/p>\n

In Bakersfield alone, law enforcement traced 83 guns to the store from 2023 to 2025, according to newly released data from the California Department of Justice. That was the highest number for a store with an active firearms dealer license in any of the state\u2019s 10 most populous cities.<\/p>\n

The Trace reported in May<\/a> that the Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman chain, which has over 30 locations across California, accounted for a disproportionate share of crime guns recovered in the state. The state Department of Justice defines crime guns as those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed.<\/p>\n

The latest data adds a new dimension, showing the number of crime guns traced to individual stores by law enforcement in the state\u2019s biggest cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Turner\u2019s on Mohawk Street has been in operation since late 2020<\/a>. The business that previously occupied that storefront, Second Amendment Sports, which is no longer an actively licensed dealer, had 100 sales traced to gun recoveries in Bakersfield. All together, that means 183 firearms sold at that location were later recovered by law enforcement as crime guns in the same city during this three-year window. That number is higher than the combined total of the top five dealers for any other city in the data, including Los Angeles, Oakland, or San Diego.<\/p>\n

In Bakersfield, outreach workers are making links between the store and violence in the city. Juan Avila, of the community violence intervention group Garden Pathways, said crime guns came up at a recent meeting between the Bakersfield Police Department and local CVI groups. \u201cMany of those were being traced to Turner\u2019s,\u201d Avila said.<\/p>\n

He added that tracking crime guns was a newer metric for the city\u2019s violence intervention workers. \u201cThat\u2019s really what grabbed my attention is to see how many guns actually can be traced back to a local shop,\u201d Avila said.<\/p>\n

In response to a request for comment, Bakersfield Police spokesperson Sally Selby said the department is \u201cunaware of there being any illegal firearms sales or transactions that are occurring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Crime\"<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s outlets are among the top firearms dealers tied to crime guns in Los Angeles, Fresno, Anaheim, and Long Beach. One Sacramento-area store, just outside the city limits, was connected to 38 crime guns recovered by law enforcement in the capital.<\/p>\n

Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty said that the prevalence of guns from that store, and from the dealer connected to the most crime guns for Sacramento, River City Gun Exchange, merit scrutiny from state and local law enforcement \u201cto see if there\u2019s any shortcomings in background checks and procedures to make sure that guns aren\u2019t getting in the wrong hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts, including former ATF agents and researchers, said a mix of factors<\/a> may be behind the number of guns traced to a store, including location, inventory, prices, clientele, and nearby competition.<\/p>\n

One chain, 8,500 crime guns<\/p>\n

The Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman chain remains the biggest source of crime guns across California, according to the report<\/a> released in July. From 2023 to 2025, law enforcement in the state traced more than 8,500 crime guns to Turner\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The retailer is California\u2019s largest gun seller, and its sale of 540,000 firearms makes up a significant percentage of all sales in the data\u2019s three-year time period: 21.8 percent. The chain makes up an even greater share of guns sold and traced during the time span: 25.9 percent.<\/p>\n

The outsize share of crime guns alarms those who track these trends.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurner\u2019s is doing something on a corporate level \u2014 or they\u2019re not doing something on the corporate level \u2014 to prevent this,\u201d said Christian Heyne of the gun safety group Brady United. \u201cThey have been a rash on this report for the last four years.\u201d Other large retailers like Bass Pro Shops and Sportsman\u2019s Warehouse don\u2019t top the list, he said, and see smaller percentages of their sales recovered as crime guns. Statewide, Turner\u2019s locations in Southern California occupied the top eight spots in the list of traces.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are being killed by the guns Turner\u2019s sells, and it demands investigation and action,\u201d Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn told The Trace about the new data. Hahn called for<\/a> a probe into the company following the Trace\u2019s initial reporting. Brady later joined Hahn in urging investigation.<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman attracted national attention this spring, after Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly attempted to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent\u2019s Dinner in April, was revealed to have been armed with a shotgun he purchased at a Turner\u2019s in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance.<\/p>\n

Turner\u2019s Outdoorsman did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a June statement to the right-wing outlet The Daily Caller, a Turner\u2019s executive said the company had a \u201cproven commitment to regulatory compliance\u201d and that data on traces \u201cdoes not indicate wrongdoing by the retailer.\u201d ATF inspection paperwork from 2015 called one store\u2019s recordkeeping \u201cmeticulous\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\""A\"<\/p>\n

The new report shows state inspectors found a number of violations at the Turner\u2019s locations inspected in 2025. Many were for minor issues, but an inspector identified a possible straw purchase violation at the San Bernardino location. That store was connected to more crime guns than any other dealer in the state: 781 from 2023 to 2025.<\/p>\n

In the new data, guns sold at Turner\u2019s stores showed up at crime scenes at a rate higher than guns sold at other dealers in the state.<\/p>\n

The crime guns traced to the chain also wound up at crime scenes quickly \u2014 less than a year after purchase \u2014\u00a036 percent more often than guns from other dealers. Regulators consider<\/a> a \u201ctime-to-crime\u201d of less than one year an indicator of trafficking.<\/p>\n

Guns take several paths to crime scenes. Some are stolen from their owners. Others are bought through straw purchases \u2014 the act of illegally buying a gun on behalf of someone else \u2014 or trafficked into the underground market. And some are legally purchased by a person who later commits a crime.<\/p>\n

No other U.S. state publishes data on the stores connected to crime guns, and Congress has prohibited the ATF from sharing retailer-level data since 2003.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Aaron Mendelson, CalMatters Handguns on display at a gun shop in California on July 12, 2022. Photo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,724,5456,735,734],"class_list":["post-439526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-criminal-justice","tag-guns","tag-kern-county","tag-law-enforcement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}