The Brief

At 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, the federal government will shut down unless Congress can pass a short-term funding measure, something that currently looks unlikely to happen.

Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled House passed a continuing resolution that funds the government through Nov. 21 at current spending levels, while putting some extra money into a few specific areas, like security for the executive and judicial branches, as well as for members of Congress.

On Sept. 19, the House passed its bill, but that same day the bill failed in the Senate, as did a Democratic counter-offer, before that chamber left for the recess during the Jewish high holidays.

For a brief moment, it looked like the White House would get involved. Democratic Leaders wrote to President Donald Trump, demanding a meeting to discuss government funding. Trump agreed Wednesday only to reverse course the next day and cancel the meeting.

House Republican leaders also have cancelled votes for Sept. 29 and 30, effectively keeping members out of town in the run-up to the shutdown. The move puts pressure on the Senate to pass the House version or get the blame for the shutdown. (House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is bringing Democrats back Monday night to show they’d be willing to negotiate and ready to vote on a revised funding measure.)

Instead of meeting, Republicans and Democrats are trading blame for who’s responsible, even as the clock continues to tick down.

Republicans have said they’re doing what Democrats have done in the past — passing a clean seven-week CR to allow negotiations to take place.

Democrats respond that they’re willing to work with the president but want to use this as an opportunity to protect health care coverage. They’re seeking continuation of the enhanced ACA tax credit, something some moderate Republicans support. Democrats also want to reverse the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, a change that’s extremely unlikely given that Republicans put so much effort this summer into passing Trump’s signature bill.

Unlike past shutdowns, this could be very different.

The administration will have the authority to determine what functions are considered “essential” or not. Those employees will still work without getting paid. But this is also the first shutdown since Trump started slashing the federal workforce, and his administration is threatening more layoffs if a shutdown happens.

The Office of Management and Budget, led by Russ Vought, sent a memo to department and agency heads saying that for any programs where funding lapses or is not deemed essential that they “are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices.”

That could mean that when the federal government does eventually reopen, it would return with an even smaller permanent workforce.

The longest government shutdown happened in 2018, during Trump’s first term. It started around the winter holidays and lasted 35 days, costing the economy approximately $11 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But that was considered only a partial shutdown because some appropriations bills had been signed into law, so not all parts of the federal government were closed. That would not be the case this time around.

Another shutdown happened in 2013, at the start of the new federal fiscal year and lasted 16 days. It reduced GDP by $20 billion, per Moody’s.

A shutdown impacts discretionary spending, which is set by the budget bills that Congress is required to pass and the president must sign into law. Things like Medicare and Medicaid payments, veterans' benefits, and Social Security are not funded through an appropriations bill and should continue uninterrupted.

Still, a shutdown could have impacts in large and small ways across the state, and around the country, especially if it were not quickly resolved.

If you’re flying soon …

Air traffic controllers and most TSA employees are considered “essential workers” and have to stay on the job, even if it means working without pay while the rest of the federal government shuts down.

If a shutdown drags on, travelers could see more “sick outs” of key personnel. That happened during the 2018-19 government shutdown as workers showed their anger over missing paychecks.

Lastly, if you’re planning on any international travel in the new year, you may need to build in even more time for passport renewals. The U.S. Passport agency will remain open, but it could take longer to process applications with some employees furloughed.

What about the mail?

The Postal Service will keep the mail moving as usual in the event of a shutdown. The USPS. is primarily self-funded and doesn’t depend on the appropriations process to continue running as usual.

Benefit and Safety Net Programs

Social Security, VA and other benefits will continue, but there could be some delay in services, such as processing applications.

In a shutdown, the first to feel the pinch could be the mothers and young children who rely on the WIC food program. That benefit cuts off almost immediately. According to Colorado’s WIC dashboard, just over 100,000 clients were enrolled in the program in August 2025.

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, will last longer but could also run out if a shutdown drags on. Typically continuing resolutions authorize USDA to send out benefits for 30 days after a shutdown starts. Stores that accept the benefit would not be able to renew their license during that time.

There could be missed paychecks and lost jobs

Perhaps the biggest impacts in Colorado will be felt by the state’s approximately 41,000 federal employees and 36,000 active duty military service members, who do not get a paycheck during a government shutdown. The White House also is threatening mass layoffs (RIF) of federal employees, in addition to furlough notices, if a shutdown happens.

A shutdown would happen toward the end of a pay period, so the first full paycheck missed for federal employees would be Oct. 24, while for the military it would be Oct. 15.

The only salaries the federal government continues to pay during a shutdown will be members of Congress and the president, according to the Constitution. However, elected officials can request that their paychecks be deferred while a shutdown is ongoing.

Federal employees and military will get back pay once the shutdown is over.

Earlier this year, tens of thousands of federal employees accepted deferred resignations, leaving their positions while still collecting their pay through the end of September. That program will end before the shutdown takes hold.

National Parks are a big question mark

During the 2018-19 shutdown, the Trump administration kept National Parks accessible to the public, even as many Park Service employees had to stay home.

At the time, there were reports of damage and trash in the unattended parks. And a GAO opinion in September 2019 found the Trump administration violated federal law when it used entrance fees to keep the parks accessible.

In 2013, the Obama administration closed national parks, but some states, including Colorado, paid to keep theirs open.

Gov. Jared Polis said Colorado is evaluating its options and would be a “willing partner if needed to use limited state funds to keep our biggest park fully operational if necessary.” Rocky Mountain National Park was the fifth-most-visited national park last year.

“We would certainly ask the Federal government to keep the parks open and staffed, or create avenues for the state to assist in keeping parks open and protected,” Polis said in a statement. “If Congress does not fund the federal government, I urge the Administration to prioritize the operations of the national parks that so many people love and are a huge economic driver for our rural communities, especially during leaf peeping season.”

The weather forecasts will keep coming

Ahead of past possible shutdowns, the National Weather Service has said it would continue to provide routine forecasts, as well as extreme weather watch and warning information through its forecasting offices.

Many other day-to-day weather operations also will continue uninterrupted, including urgent repairs to radars and other key equipment. But a shutdown could delay routine maintenance, upgrades and long-term projects for less-critical services, according to NWS.

Previous government shutdowns have delayed the processing of long-term weather and climate data at other federal agencies.

The shutdown in October 2013, for example, prevented the U.S. Geological Survey from gathering and analyzing information on damage caused by catastrophic flooding that occurred across the Front Range just a few weeks prior, according to an assessment from the Obama administration.

The data loss prevented scientists and first responders from fully assessing the effects of the $4 billion disaster and likely hurt the federal government’s ability to share timely information with state officials about possible pollution caused by the flooding in the South Platte River Basin, the assessment found.

Since fall 2025, the Trump administration has moved to make it more challenging for people to become U.S. citizens.

In the past, candidates for naturalization studied the answers to 100 questions issued by the federal government. During their civics test, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers would ask 10 questions from the list; to pass, candidates had to answer six correctly. Now, candidates must be prepared to answer 128 questions, and more correct answers are required to pass.

The Department of Homeland Security has also reintroduced “neighborhood investigations” into aspiring citizens — a discretionary practice that had been shelved since the 1990s.

About a year since those changes were implemented, advocates in Southern California say they are seeing additional barriers, including delays in the scheduling of naturalization interviews and heightened scrutiny of applicants who request waivers for testing requirements due to a physical, developmental, or mental disability.

DHS has also proposed changes that could make it significantly more expensive to apply for naturalization; more expensive for candidates to appeal denials; and eliminate fee waivers and reduced fees for low-income applicants.

The agency has said that these changes are needed to cover the cost of adjudicating naturalization applications.

For Dahni Tsuboi, CEO of the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, this claim rings hollow.

“When you compare the $240 billion that have been invested by Congress in the last 18 months on the enforcement side, and then, for the people who are taking all the steps to become citizens, we're just making that much harder, I think that's very alarming,” she said.

A sharp drop in naturalization interviews

In recent months, local immigrant advocacy groups have seen a drop in the number of people getting scheduled for naturalization interviews.

At the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, “we still have folks who applied before the [changes to the civics tests were implemented last October] that are still awaiting an interview,” said staff attorney Shawntel Williams.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California has been doing naturalization work for 40 years, Tsuboi said. Typically, 5 to 10 of their clients get scheduled for naturalization interviews every month. Since April 2026, that number has dropped to zero.

According to the nonprofit, the total number of naturalization adjudications per month — including approvals and denials — went from 78,379 in September 2025 to 37,832 by January 2026.

Tsuboi fears that naturalization rates could drop even further if DHS’s fee changes are implemented.

The changes, she said, could have an outsized impact on Asian Americans communities, who make up the largest share of naturalized U.S. citizens. At the nonprofit she represents, Tsuboi added, “75% of the individuals who apply for naturalization use the fee waiver or the reduced fees.”

How advocates are responding to changes  

To support immigrants navigating the evolving naturalization landscape, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles’s Shawntel Williams and her colleague, Eugenia Kim, have been hosting free citizenship education workshops at the nonprofit’s offices in Westlake.

They also offer free pre-screening clinics for people who are interested in determining their eligibility.

For people with a physical, developmental, or mental disability, Kim said “we strongly recommend — more than ever — that if you believe that you qualify to apply for an N-648." The form is a medical certification that's completed by a doctor who has personal knowledge of your disabilities and has actually treated you over the years.

"We also recommend that applicants have that completed N-648 reviewed closely by an attorney,” Kim said.

She and Williams plan to continue hosting their legal clinics for the foreseeable future.

For aspiring U.S. citizens, Williams added, legal advice has become essential, as news of all the changes to the naturalization process could be discouraging.

“We don't want people to count themselves out,” she said.

El seis, they call it.

That day in June of last year when armed federal immigration officers descended on a garment shop in Los Angeles’ Fashion District, arresting and shackling more than a dozen employees before whisking them away in unmarked vans. The raid on Ambiance Apparel became one of the defining images of the June surge in Los Angeles.

For the family and friends of detained workers from Ambiance Apparel, who gathered for an anniversary press conference this summer, the date had become so ingrained in their minds that it earned the Spanish shorthand for “the sixth.”

An organizer assured the apprehensive crowd that they had permission to be there but cautioned that, if anything happened during the event, they should walk calmly to their cars. When a helicopter hovered overhead a few minutes later, a woman in the crowd glanced up and winced. High-profile raids have given way to a quieter era of enforcement, but arrests and removals are still happening at high rates across Southern California and, during a national surge in late June, officials detained more than 10,000 people in five days.

“We’re still afraid,” said Francisco, a longtime garment worker in the crowd who works for a different company and asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons. After that day, he said, the Fashion District became “a ghost town.”

The financial impact of the raids was swift and devastating across the region.

But commercial corridors near enforcement sites got hit especially hard. In the Fashion District, where a majority of workers and shoppers are Latino, foot traffic tanked, falling almost to pandemic-era levels.

Businesses near nine immigration enforcement sites saw a steep decline in visitors, accumulating an estimated $3.16 million in losses in the two weeks after the raids began, according to a July study from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, which analyzed cell phone location data. Hardest hit of all was the Fashion District — a business zone so dense researchers tallied more than 550 businesses within a half mile of Ambiance — which lost an estimated $1.52 million in two weeks.

The Fashion District bleeds into the Piñata District, where papered figurines of ICE agents are on display.

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And that estimate is conservative, said Ariana Valle, one of the authors of the report, who noted the figure accounts only for formal businesses, not the many street vendors in the district.

Researchers interviewed several business owners this spring, Valle said, including some in the Fashion District whose sales declined so drastically after the raids that they had to take out loans and cancel expansion plans. Others were considering closing their businesses and many spoke of the day of the Ambiance raid in still-fresh detail.

One respondent recalled the collective clang of dozens of roll-down metal security gates on storefronts slamming down, Valle said, and some business owners said even whispers about the possibility of another raid severely erode their sales.

“They are hurting,” said Valle, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Davis. “It’s been a very unsteady and unstable recovery for many of them.”

Anthony Rodriguez, chief executive of the Fashion District’s business improvement district, said that although the area is seeing a gradual recovery, many business owners told the group they’re still working to regain customers.

On a Saturday morning this spring, vendors had set up stands on a sidewalk in the Fashion District.

A man was selling knockoff Lululemon leggings for $10, and a mother-daughter duo hawked World Cup totes for $4. An influencer walked backward holding a tripod with an iPhone facing her.

“We’re coming to you live from L.A.’s Fashion District!” she said. “Let’s go find some deals.”

The 107-block district, home to retail and wholesale shops and clothing factories, is a key apparel hub for the Western Hemisphere due to its proximity to the ports in the region. Wholesale buyers travel from across the globe to visit showrooms downtown, searching for wedding gowns or street-style sneakers to resell in their shops.

The district encompasses Santee Alley, a bargain bazaar, and bleeds into the Piñata District, where a longtime staple — papered figurines of President Donald Trump — was joined last summer by a newly popularized design: an ICE agent.

But on this Saturday morning, the busiest stand was the one with the woman selling fresh orange juice and $5 chorizo and potato burritos. Almost every other shop along one stretch had a “For Lease” sign taped to its glass door.

Outside a closed storefront, a woman browsed a metal rack, lingering on a zebra-print halter dress.

“For $1?” she asked the woman working the stand.

“No, I can’t,” the employee said.

“Come on.”

“I can’t. $5?”

The shopper walked away without the dress, and the employee shook her head.

A few weekends later, foot traffic was even slower. The streets were quiet save for the thump of a norteño-sax song blaring from a speaker outside V&C Casual, a shop in the Stanford Wholesale Mart.

The shop’s owner, Regino Tirado, sipped his coffee as he waited for customers. But everything had been slow, he said, since “El Seis.”

“After that day, no one wanted to come to the Fashion District,” he continued, panning toward the sidewalk. “Look, it’s empty.”

Regino Tirado stands outside his store in the L.A. Fashion District.

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Tirado has worked in the Fashion District for more than 25 years through several other lean times, including the Great Recession and pandemic lockdowns. But the past year has been the hardest.

“El peor de los peores,” he called it. The worst of the worst.

A shop across from him closed two months earlier, he said, and another in the plaza shuttered a month before that. Tirado’s business, which sells women’s puffer vests and jackets, had dropped by nearly 60% since a year earlier, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can stay open.

“It’s day by day,” he said.

A feverish demand for Mexico apparel during the World Cup had brought some reprieve. Tirado sold more than 2,000 jerseys to his wholesale buyers for around $10 a piece, but even that put him below the $25,000 in sales he used to bring in most months. These days, he’s lucky to make $10,000. And that’s before paying employees and the $5,000 rent.

His wholesale buyers, some of whom live in Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia, used to visit twice a month to check out new merchandise. Now they come every other month, he said, and sales have increasingly moved to transactions made over WhatsApp.

“The main shoppers are Latino,” Tirado said, “and now everyone is scared.”

That fear is still palpable for Francisco, the longtime garment worker.

The 62-year-old, who specializes in sewing undergarments, spends his shifts picking up reams of fabric from vendors in the Fashion District and always keeps an eye out for parked SUVs, wondering if they might be unmarked ICE vehicles. He has stopped offering to pick up friends at LAX or taking occasional trips to visit his nephew in the Bay Area.

Some fellow garment workers now take Ubers home from work to avoid the bus stop, where officials have made arrests, and others switched to night shifts to evade raids. His roommates — a couple and their young children — now hole up inside on weekends, and although it pains him, he understands. He had stopped going for Saturday morning runs himself.

He followed news reports about the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens and the January killings of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, as well as the recent fatal shootings by ICE officers of immigrant men in Texas and Maine. The cases transported him to his childhood in the highlands of Guatemala, where he grew up during the nation’s brutal civil war, in which the government orchestrated the torture and killing of thousands of civilians, many of them indigenous Mayans like Francisco.

“It never crossed my mind that this would happen in the United States,” he said. “I came here to escape this.”

Francisco, whose first language was Kʼiche’, learned Spanish around age 8. As a teenager, he found work at a factory in Guatemala City sewing shirts for an American menswear brand. He eventually moved to Mexico, where he got a job in another warehouse, and then to Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

He worked a variety of jobs, including for a flooring contractor, and started taking English classes. But when work dried up after the 2008 financial crisis, he returned to his roots, taking on sewing gigs in the Fashion District. He eventually got a job sewing masks at Los Angeles Apparel, the site of a massive workplace outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was exposed and got so sick he spent two weeks in the hospital.

Francisco, a garment worker who is identified by his first name only for safety reasons, at work near downtown.

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After his release, his roommates were afraid of getting infected and asked him to move out. With financial help from the Garment Workers Center, an organization that advocates for workers, he moved into a hotel room for a time. He feels deeply grateful, he said, to have weathered that turbulent period.

“But,” he said, referring to the ongoing immigration crackdown, “another wave came.”

The national surge of detentions in late June exacerbated fears that had slowly dissipated in the community, said Francisco, adding that four of his friends were detained in the June 6, 2025, raids across the region, including a fellow Guatemalan from his soccer team. That morning, Francisco had been a few blocks from the Fashion District when a friend messaged him to avoid the area.

“Me escapé por un pelito de rana,” he said, using a Spanish phrase similar to escaping by the skin of one’s teeth.

During the June 6 press conference outside Ambiance, family members of detained workers stood not far from the spot where they had a year earlier peered past yellow police tape, watching their loved ones get loaded into vans. Other workers were detained from a separate location tied to Ambiance, whose representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the workers were ultimately released from immigration detention, including a man who introduced himself to the crowd as Lázaro.

“What was a normal day — a day like any other — turned into a painful nightmare,” he said.

A few minutes earlier, the crowd cheered as Ming Tanigawa-Lau, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, walked to the lectern. She had represented and helped secure the release from custody of another Ambiance worker.

“What took place last year was just a preview of what we would experience. Not only in L.A., but across the nation,” she said. “It tore families apart and left entire communities living in fear.”

In the crowd, Leslie Quechol nodded, cradling her newborn daughter to her chest.

A year earlier, she had been scheduled to go to her first OB-GYN appointment since finding out she was pregnant when she heard chatter about a raid at Ambiance. She cancelled her appointment and rushed to the shop, where she saw workers in a line with shackles around their wrists.

One of them was her cousin, whom she considers an older brother. She screamed his name, but he couldn’t hear her.

Quechol thought immediately of his wife and three children, especially his middle son, who has autism. He had recently made some big developmental progress. What would happen now, she wondered? And how would they make ends meet without their breadwinner?

“I knew everything was going to go downhill,” said Quechol, who added that, in spite of their ordeal, the family took deep solace in the support of fellow members of the Zapotec community. Her cousin told a community organizer who served as a media liaison at the event that he and his family were too afraid to speak with a reporter.

The Ambiance building in the Fashion District, where immigrantion officers detained more than a dozen workers.

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As the crowd dispersed, some family members stayed behind to dance to live music, and Francisco stood on a nearby sidewalk taking in the scene.

He reflected on the many jobs he’d had in the Fashion District — on the warehouse bosses who paid by the number of pieces sewn instead of hourly and how he sometimes earned as little as $300 a week. He had worked his way out of that place and into a more fulfilling, stable job where he has more autonomy.

He could finally afford to have fewer roommates and no longer thrift all his clothes. Sometimes, he said, he even treats himself to a coffee from the trendy shop near his job, reminiscing over all the years he exclusively visited the corner store downtown to get a cup for $1.

“It had more water than coffee,” he said with a chuckle.

And yet, for the first time in almost three decades, he is considering moving back to Guatemala.

He misses his sisters and often thinks about the tiny home they grew up in and how he’d like to help maintain it now that their mother is gone. He knows it hasn’t been easy for his friend, the soccer companion, who got deported back to Guatemala. But the constant unease is wearing on him.

The same search for a feeling of freedom that pulled him to the U.S. years ago was now pushing him away.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main.

Turner’s 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 — and also appeared hundreds of times during criminal investigations as the source of guns found at crime scenes.

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 (CADOJ). That was the highest number for a store with an active firearms dealer license in any of the state’s 10 most populous cities.

The Trace reported in May that the Turner's Outdoorsman chain, which has more than 30 locations across California, accounted for a disproportionate share of crime guns recovered in the state. CADOJ defines crime guns as those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed.

The latest data adds a new dimension, showing the number of crime guns traced to individual stores by law enforcement in the state’s biggest cities.

The Turner’s on Mohawk Street has been in operation since late 2020. The business that previously occupied that storefront, Second Amendment Sports, which is no longer an actively licensed dealer, had 100 sales traced to 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 5 dealers for any other city in the data, including Los Angeles, Oakland, or San Diego.

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. "Many of those were being traced to Turner's," Avila said.

He said that tracking crime guns was a newer metric for the city’s violence intervention workers. “That's really what grabbed my attention is to see how many guns actually can be traced back to a local shop,” Avila said.

In response to a request for comment, Bakersfield police spokesperson Sally Selby said the department is “unaware of there being any illegal firearms sales or transactions that are occurring.”

Turner’s 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 city limits, was connected to 38 crime guns recovered by law enforcement in the capital.

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 “to see if there's any shortcomings in background checks and procedures to make sure that guns aren't getting in the wrong hands.”

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

One chain, 8,500 crime guns

The Turner’s Outdoorsman chain remains the biggest source of crime guns across California, according to the report released in July. From 2023 to 2025, law enforcement in the state traced more than 8,500 crime guns to Turner’s.

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

The outsize share of crime guns alarms those who track these trends.

“Turner's is doing something on a corporate level — or they're not doing something on the corporate level — to prevent this,” said Christian Heyne of the gun safety group Brady United. “They have been a rash on this report for the last four years.”

Other large retailers like Bass Pro Shops and Sportsman’s Warehouse don’t top the list, he said, and see smaller percentages of their sales recovered as crime guns. Statewide, Turner’s locations in Southern California occupied the top 8 spots in the list of traces.

“People are being killed by the guns Turner’s sells, and it demands investigation and action,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn told The Trace about the new data. Hahn called for a probe into the company following the Trace’s initial reporting. Brady later joined Hahn in urging investigation.

Turner’s Outdoorsman attracted national attention this spring, after Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly attempted to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, was revealed to have been armed with a shotgun he purchased at a Turner’s in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance.

Turner’s Outdoorsman did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a statement in June to the right-wing outlet The Daily Caller, a Turner’s executive said the company had a “proven commitment to regulatory compliance” and that data on traces “does not indicate wrongdoing by the retailer.” ATF occasionally inspects gun seller operations and called one Turner’s store recordkeeping “meticulous” in a 2015 report.

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

In the new data, guns sold at Turner’s stores showed up at crime scenes at a rate higher than guns sold at other dealers in the state.

The crime guns traced to the chain also wound up at crime scenes quickly — less than a year after purchase — 36% more often than guns from other dealers. Regulators consider a “time-to-crime” of less than one year an indicator of trafficking.

Guns take several paths to crime scenes. Some are stolen from their owners. Others are bought through straw purchases — the act of illegally 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.

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.