The Brief

Eight months before Cole Tomas Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint with his shotgun in an alleged attempt to kill President Donald Trump, he walked into Turner’s Outdoorsman in Torrance, California, and purchased the weapon, a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge.

If convicted, Allen would join a long list of criminals armed with guns from the Turner’s Outdoorsman chain. Between 2022 and 2024, California law enforcement traced nearly 8,000 crime guns — those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed — back to Turner’s locations.

With over 30 outlets across California, Turner’s Outdoorsman is the biggest gun seller in the nation’s most populous state. A first-of-its-kind analysis of California Department of Justice data by The Trace shows that Turner’s is connected to more crime guns than any other California dealer or chain. And that’s not only because Turner’s sells so many guns. Among the findings:

• Turner's stores account for a fifth of guns sold in California, but make up a quarter of all crime guns.
• The chain accounted for 7,922 crime guns from 2022 to 2024. Guns it sold showed up at crime scenes at a rate 35 percent higher than other dealers in the state.
• Guns sold at Turner’s locations wound up at crime scenes quickly — less than a year after purchase — 40 percent more often than guns from other dealers. (Regulators consider a “time-to-crime” of less than one year an indicator of trafficking.)
• The Torrance store where Allen bought his shotgun sold 642 firearms later recovered as crime guns, the second-highest number of any store in the state. 
• Eight of the 10 stores with the most crime gun traces were Turner’s locations in Southern California.
• Sales at Sacramento and Stockton Turner’s stores ended up at crime scenes in under a year at some of the highest rates in the state.

It’s not clear why Turner’s is overrepresented in the data, but there are several potential reasons some dealers are tied to high numbers of crime guns. Factors such as store location, lax sales practices, the types of guns sold, and low prices can contribute to higher numbers of traces, according to academics and former law enforcement.

However, the large numbers of crime guns traced to Turner’s Outdoorsman stores warrants regulatory scrutiny, said Steve Lindley, the former head of the Bureau of Firearms at CADOJ, who now works at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It was shocking how many of the top 25 crime gun dealers in California were Turner's Outdoorsman,” Lindley told us. “Turner's has a responsibility to figure that out and do whatever they can to try and minimize that,” he said, including reviewing its training and hiring practices.

Authorities should give Turner’s stores “some extra love and attention when it comes to inspections, because there’s something going on there different than other dealers,” he added.

Turner’s Outdoorsman did not respond to interview requests.

“There’s something beyond just, ‘You sell a lot of guns, you have more crime guns,’” said Hannah Laquer, a professor at the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis. Laquer’s research has found just 15 percent of California dealers account for 98 percent of the state’s crime guns.

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

Turner’s past customers include Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Berardino mass shooter, who purchased a pistol at a San Diego Turner’s store. An acquaintance of Farook’s also bought rifles from Turner’s locations in San Diego and Corona, which Farook and his wife used in the 2015 massacre. The couple killed 14 people and injured 22 in the worst terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.

California — where the most recent data covers 2022 to 2024 — is the only state that releases detailed figures on the dealers connected to crime guns. The federal government does not, because Congress has prohibited the ATF from sharing retailer-level data since 2003.

Allen’s shotgun purchase was reported by Bloomberg, citing law enforcement records. The firearm would not appear in the data because he purchased it after the period captured by the numbers, and it was recovered by law enforcement outside the state.

Challenges Tracking Crime Guns

Those who investigate and study crime guns say there’s likely no single reason Turner’s accounts for a disproportionate share of those traced by CADOJ — and no obvious path for the public to determine why that disparity exists. But they cite several general reasons Tuner’s may account for large numbers of crime guns.

“It’s a question of geography, it’s a question of social economics. It’s a question of, is there any competition within a legitimate walking area or driving area?” said Scot Thomasson, a former special agent with the ATF.

A store’s inventory, prices, and clientele are all related to how many crime guns are traced back to it. According to research done in California by Laquer and her colleagues:

• Cheaper handguns are more likely to be recovered in crimes
• Dealers where a greater percentage of background checks are rejected have higher rates of sales later traced as crime guns
• Younger buyers purchase a disproportionate share of crime guns
• Dealers in areas with higher gun robbery and assault rates sell more crime guns

Large chains are unlikely to engage in risky sales, much less trafficking, said Joseph Bisbee, a former ATF agent who has trained over 1,000 officers on firearms trafficking investigations. “It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” he said. Lax sales practices may be a factor in other crime gun sales, he said, including dealers “not taking the responsibility seriously enough, or making a mistake that allows that straw purchase.”

At least one Turner’s location, in Pasadena, displays posters from the gun industry’s anti-straw purchase program “Don’t Lie For The Other Guy.” The ATF calls dealers “the first line of defense” against straw purchasing.

Four current and former Turner’s employees said the company’s sales and inventory practices are relatively tight. ATF inspection paperwork from 2015, while citing one store’s failure to file required reports, noted that “overall, [Turner’s] recordkeeping is meticulous.” The chain doesn’t allow sales in which a background check comes back “undetermined” to proceed. A former employee called the chain’s more stringent sales practices a notable distinction from dealers that take a less cautious approach. The current and former employees interviewed for this story asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

Most dealers and employees make a genuine effort to follow federal and state laws, according to Michael Eberhardt, a former firearms operations division chief at ATF. But dealers often fail to draw a line between their sales and subsequent criminal activity, he said. A store employee should realize that a gun “is just my carelessness — or my ignoring of the rules — away from being used to kill somebody,” he said.

Eberhardt advocates for informing dealers when guns they have sold turn up at the scenes of violent crimes. “I guarantee you that changes behavior without enacting another gun law,” he said. For its part, the public rarely learns where guns used in crimes were sold.

Experts interviewed by The Trace called for additional regulatory scrutiny on stores with high numbers of crime guns or low times-to-crime. In practice, that step might be difficult. The ATF’s inspections division, long a target of Republicans on Capitol Hill, has been understaffed for years. And last year, the Department of Justice shuttered an ATF program that monitored stores that had sold significant numbers of crime guns with low times-to-crime.

Even when inspections happen, the agency has no baseline to compare stores against one another because it doesn’t track sales. “It’s insane how in the dark we are on so much of this stuff,” said Daniel Semenza of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University.

In addition to federal oversight, states can employ their own inspectors, which California does. But in 2024, the majority of those positions — 12 out of 23 — were empty. “A very small percentage of dealers across the country are getting audited, in a way that is really shocking,” said Semenza.

Chains as the source of crime guns haven’t been the subject of academic research, he said, in part because the data simply doesn’t exist in most places. Semenza’s work has found that, in Atlanta, the presence of gun dealers in disadvantaged communities appeared to drive additional gun violence. Another study documented that shootings increase in neighborhoods after a gun dealer opens.

California’s data exists thanks to a 2021 measure introduced by Assemblymember Kevin McCarty. “This bill was a way to better trace and track guns that were used in serious crimes,” said McCarty, who is now the mayor of Sacramento. The measure drew bipartisan support in the statehouse, where only a single legislator voted against it.

“If you look at our gun violence rates versus other industrialized places across the globe, it’s atrocious,” McCarty said.

Advocates say data like California’s can assist dealers in preventing sales to suspicious buyers, equip lawmakers with the knowledge to craft better policy, and help law enforcement fight gun trafficking.

Law enforcement sources said that regulators should assess operations across chains, something that is not standard practice in an industry in which locations are individually licensed.

In late February, the Midwestern chain Fleet Farm settled a suit brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. The company agreed to pay $1 million, change training and discipline related to straw purchases, and implement a new system that informs staff when a buyer’s previous purchases were recovered as crime guns. Federal prosecutors had previously alleged the retailer sold dozens of guns to a straw purchaser.

“States have mechanisms and abilities to push dealers to be responsible,” said David Pucino, legal director at the gun safety nonprofit Giffords Law Center. “And they also have the ability to take action against those who fail to do so, or refuse to do so.”

Editorial support for this story was provided by The California Newsroom, a collaboration of public media outlets throughout the state, with NPR as its national partner. This story was published in connection with The Trace, where Mendelson is a news developer.

In notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, thousands of fans have been taking public transit to get to the World Cup.

Metro has logged more than 100,000 rides to and from SoFi Stadium for the first four matches in Inglewood, on its special shuttle buses carrying fans directly to the stadium from various locations across the region. That service costs $1.75 a pop – the same as a typical bus ride.

The transit agency organized the enhanced bus system to bring passengers to the stadium directly from as far as Newport Beach and as nearby as Culver City. Ridership on those buses has jumped each match – from 18,551 rides to and from the first game between the U.S. and Paraguay to more than 29,000 rides when Iran played Belgium on Sunday afternoon.

There were long lines to catch the shuttle at Union Station before the first two matches. One rider, Cristian Vasquez, came from the Antelope Valley for the U.S.-Paraguay match. He left home at 9:30 a.m. and was the first in line for the bus.

“It’s a service that really helps out the community that probably can't afford SoFi Stadium's parking lot or the existing parking areas,” he said.

After the Iran-New Zealand match, LAist observed long waits for a bus ride home from SoFi, as the crowds exiting after the match all lined up to board the buses at the same time.

People have also been taking the train to the tournament. According to Metro's numbers, when Iran played New Zealand at SoFi last week, K Line ridership was up 41% and C Line ridership jumped 23%, compared to a typical Monday. Those lines are the closest to the stadium.

Other fan events such as the FIFA Fan Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum have led to similar spikes for Metro. On the day of the first match in Los Angeles, when the U.S. beat Paraguay 4-1, the agency reported that fare gate taps at the Expo/USC station were up nearly 600% compared to an average day.

Alicia Greene took Metrolink and Metro to the Fan Fest from Anaheim and was enthusiastic about the journey.

"The Metro system is awesome," she said. "It couldn't be easier."

Angelenos packed trains in Koreatown last week when South Korea and Mexico played each other in a highly anticipated match. Ridership on the newly extended D Line was up more than 95%.

"While we were laser-focused on the stadium, something else was rising across town," Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins wrote in a blog post. "In Koreatown, thousandsof fans poured onto our rail lines at key stations like Wilshire/Western and Wilshire Normandie and into the streets to watch the Mexico-South Korea rematch."

The World Cup is considered a test run for public transit before the 2028 Olympics, and it's not over yet. The next game in Los Angeles is Thursday, when the U.S. plays Turkey at 7 p.m.

Kavish Harjai, Destiny Torres and Matt Ballinger contributed to this report.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a nearly $21 billion spending plan for the next school year.

The budget includes raises, class size reductions and increased mental health support that are part of new contracts with the district’s largest labor unions.

There is also nearly $5 billion in school construction and renovation projects, which are funded by voter-approved bonds — that money cannot be shifted to pay for salaries or other school needs.

LAUSD’s budget next year exceeds expected revenue by $2 billion. The district will, for the third consecutive year, pay the difference with reserves.

However, district staff say by the 2028-29 school year, the budget deficit will grow to $3.6 billion. The board recently approved a fiscal stabilization plan to solve the deficit — but which will likely result in the elimination of thousands of jobs.

The board’s meeting begins at 10 a.m. Tuesday and will stream online.

An earthquake is overdue along Southern California’s “critically stressed” San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, according to a new study.

As stress builds on a fault over centuries, it builds pressure that has to be released in an earthquake. In the study, scientists found that the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are under more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years, meaning that a massive earthquake could be on the way.

“Because it’s been quite a long time since the Southern San Andreas or the San Jacinto have had a large earthquake, we’ve accumulated a lot of stress,” said Kate Scharer, a co-author of the study and a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Using geological evidence, including tree-ring records and sediment samples, a team of scientists created a computer model that shows how pressure accumulates along faults over time. Then they ran the model up to the present day to estimate how much stress is now building beneath our region. They found that pressure has been gradually building since the last Big One in 1857, one of California’s largest seismic events on record.

“The idea that all of those segments of the fault could have enough stress for an imminent future earthquake was already there,” said Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and a professor at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “This [study] puts it on more of a quantitative, rigorous scientific basis.”

One area of interest is the Cajon Pass, the narrow corridor between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains.

“Cajon Pass could act as an ‘earthquake gate,’ like a junction that either stops or transmits large ruptures between the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults depending on stress conditions,” said Liliane Burkhard, the lead author of the study and a research affiliate in the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology.

The pass is a place where a major earthquake could jump from one fault system to another, Burkhard said. It could allow the rupture to spread farther across Southern California and affect millions more people across the Coachella Valley and San Bernardino County.

Going forward, Burkhard hopes to study other earthquake-prone regions where several fault systems interact and create risks that remain difficult to predict.

Scientists agree that Southern California will experience another major earthquake. The challenge is that no one knows exactly when.

“It could happen today, tomorrow, or in 10 years, or in 30 years,” said Ahmed Elbanna, director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and a professor at USC who was not involved in the study. “On geological time scales, these are all very short.”

So it’s a question of when, not if.

“We should certainly expect to experience large earthquakes in our lifetimes,” Scharer said.

A refrigerated warehouse operated by Lineage Logistics has burned in Boyle Heights for nearly a week. Public health officials are urging residents nearby and downwind to protect themselves from the smoky air.

But what exactly is in the air is still unclear.

Authorities say they’ve cleared the most hazardous materials — ammonia and lithium-ion batteries — from the fire zone. A spokesperson for the L.A. Fire Department said foam insulation, wood pallets of food, and solar panels on top of the 500,000 square-foot building continue to smolder.

Materials including plastics, electronics and even rotting meat are likely burning, which means the pollution particles emitted “tend to be highly enriched with toxic organics, toxic metals, that are above and beyond what just normal, day-to-day air pollution would look like,” said UCLA air pollution researcher Yifang Zhu.

She said air quality indexes may capture the concentration of particulate matter in the air, but not necessarily the specific toxins in them.

“You'll have almost like a double jeopardy in a sense that the levels [of particulate matter] are higher, and the toxicity is also higher,” she said.

Measuring heavy metals or volatile organic compounds requires special monitoring equipment, Zhu said.

“It’s very difficult to measure,” she said.

But she suspects at least some types of health-harming heavy metals are likely to be in the smoke.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado on Monday called for more specifics about what is in the smoke.

People “shouldn't have to guess about what they're breathing or rely on rumors, scattered information and updates, and incomplete information,” she said at a news conference. Jurado, whose council district includes Boyle Heights, added that data from regulators, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District, should be released in clear, understandable language in English and Spanish.

The South Coast AQMD told LAist before Jurado spoke that the agency has monitors that measure particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, but not other types of pollutants. The agency said it has set up additional monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School. The agency added that the Environmental Protection Agency is also monitoring air quality at the fence line of the facility. LAist has reached out to the EPA for details.

Zhu added that even when the fire is eventually put out, the cleanup can kick up even more pollution — a lesson learned through her research after the L.A. fires.

“ I think people really need to take precautions,” Zhu said, emphasizing that those closest to the fire and downwind should avoid being outside as much as possible, keep windows closed, run a HEPA or MERV 13 air filter, and wear an N95 or similar mask otherwise.

UC Irvine toxicology professor Michael Kleinman said if thawed meat is also burning, that could lead to further toxic gases being released.

Experts urged precautions, especially if you smell smoke.

“ For people who are very close to the fire, like the firefighters themselves, they have exposure to both particulate matter and potential toxic gases, and that's why you'll see them wearing respirators,” said UC Irvine chemistry professor Suzanne Blum. “But once you're some feet away from the building, then the primary concern is the particulate smoke that is coming from this fire.”