GOLETA, Calif. — For over a decade, Goodland Guns operated in an unassuming strip mall in Old Town Goleta, where it sold handguns, rifles and ammo two doors down from the bustling original location of the national Habit Burger & Grill chain.

The firearms retailer never got any formal complaints at that location, according to city officials in Goleta, an affluent Santa Barbara County coastal town.

But this summer, Goodland Guns moved to a new location next to a daycare center, where it now shares a fence with the playground. The move stunned and outraged families in Goleta — a place traumatized by mass shootings — and made it the latest California city to contemplate its own restrictions on gun stores.

Goleta is where, in 2006, a former postal worker killed a former neighbor then fatally shot six employees at a mail sorting facility where she once worked before killing herself.

And it is where 22-year-old Elliot Rodger bought his first gun — a Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol purchased at another store, Goleta Valley Gun and Supply — for use in his 2014 rampage in neighboring Isla Vista, where he killed six University of California, Santa Barbara students before taking his own life.

“We are a community that has been touched by significant gun violence,” said Ethan Bertrand, board president for the Goleta Union School District, which has an elementary school campus half a mile west of Goodland Guns’ new space.

“Parents and their children do not want the visible reminder of gun violence and the fear that comes along with that when they’re dropping their kids off at school,” he said.

Dan Ashton, the owner of Goodland Guns, told the Los Angeles Times he has strictly followed all of Goleta’s laws and relocated only after his former landlord “pretty much doubled the rent.” He signed a 25-year lease this summer for the building next to the daycare after struggling to find a new space and attempting to move into an industrial zone.

He is hosting his grand opening Friday.

“I’m a legitimate business and highly regulated,” said Ashton, whose store has operated in the city for 13 years. “I fully plan on retiring here. I love Goleta.”

The Goleta City Council and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors now are considering new laws that would create mandatory buffer zones between gun stores and places where children congregate, including daycares, K-12 schools and parks, as well as other restrictions.

Such mandates would not retroactively apply to Goodland Guns or other existing firearms dealers.

A patchwork of laws

California, which has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, largely prohibits possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of a K-12 school under the Gun-Free School Zone Act of 1995.

But the state law and a similarly named federal measure exempt private homes and businesses, including gun stores, within that space. And the laws do not apply to stand-alone preschools or daycare centers.

California does not have a statewide mandate dictating how far a firearms retailer must be from a school or daycare. Rather, it has a patchwork of municipal and county zoning ordinances, with some — including in the cities of Burbank and Culver City and Alameda County — requiring buffer zones.

“It’s happening city by city. Why doesn’t the state step in and say, ‘You can’t have a gun store next to a preschool?” said Goleta City Manager Robert Nisbet, adding that local officials had been communicating with state lawmakers since the Goodland Guns controversy surfaced.

“We’re going to keep pushing on that,” Nisbet said. “It’s our duty to use this experience to make a positive impact.”

In Goleta, municipal code classifies licensed gun stores as “general retail,” the same designation given to shops selling sporting goods, clothing, furniture and a wide variety of other items.

Goodland Guns, one of two licensed gun stores in Goleta, obtained a business license from the city on June 4 for the building next to the Here We Grow infant care and preschool center, which opened six months earlier.

A long search for a new location

Ashton, 40, said the large rear parking lot at his previous location shared a fence with Rainbow School, another daycare and preschool, without controversy.

He said he struggled to find a new space for the last two years because Goleta has little available commercial space — and because numerous property owners refused to rent to a gun store.

Ashton said he tried to move to a building in an industrial zone that, per the city manager, previously was an automotive shop. But because his business is designated retail and restricted to commercial zoning districts, the city required him to get a building permit that included detailed architectural site plans, including electrical, plumbing and elevation drawings “like it was a brand-new building,” he said.

Ashton said he gave up after hiring two architects and spending more than $20,000 on a byzantine permitting process that, he believed, held his business to an unfair standard.

He even tried last year to rent the building now housing Here We Grow, but the owners told him they preferred to rent to the daycare because the space was already set up as one, he said.

Finally, he settled on the building next door: a former 7-Eleven that sat empty for years.

Ashton, the father of an 11-year-old girl, said he has installed new fencing and a privacy screen so his business cannot be seen from the daycare. He added that California law requires people carrying handguns into and out of the store to keep them in a locked container and for handguns and long guns to be unloaded.

But his business previously has had some security issues. In 2021, thieves entered Goodland Guns’ former location by cutting a hole in the wall and stole five pistols, four shotguns, and two rifles, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

‘Families are very vocal. They don’t feel safe’

Heather Robbins, who owns the Here We Grow daycare, said her enrollment dropped from 14 to eight children after Goodland Guns moved in.

“Families are very vocal. They don’t feel safe,” Robbins said. “I haven’t had one person call me and say, ‘Yes! I feel so safe; I’m bringing my kids to you right now.’”

Robbins, who owns another Here We Grow campus just outside Santa Barbara city limits, opened the Goleta location in January. She said she is licensed for 39 children there but “does not expect to survive” with just eight.

She has been calling parents on the waitlist for the original campus, offering them spots in Goleta, but “they’re feeling a little iffy” about the gun store. She has obtained more than 2,200 signatures on an online petition protesting its relocation.

“I don’t know why this didn’t raise a flag for somebody, whether it was the gun store owner or the city,” Robbins said. “I don’t know why the license for a business with semiautomatic weapons is the same as somebody who sells fishing gear. It shouldn’t be.”

Potential buffer zones

Last month, the Goleta Union School District board passed a resolution urging the cities of Goleta and Santa Barbara, as well as the county, to establish minimum distance requirements of 1,000 feet between gun stores and schools and daycares, and to restrict their presence along “routes regularly traveled by children and youth to and from schools and other activities.”

The Goleta City Council on Tuesday directed city staffers to evaluate options for regulating firearms retailers, including potential buffer zones, changes to their treatment as “general retail” businesses, and additional business license requirements.

The City Council will vote later this month on a temporary moratorium on new gun stores for up to one year while staffers do that work, Nisbet, the city manager, said in an email.

At the council meeting, Ashton called the actions an “attack against my business.”

“More regulation is only going to soothe those complaining and (is an) attempt to save your seats in political office,” he told the council. “There’s already more regulation in this state against firearms dealers than in any other state.”

Becky Davis, who told the council that she and her husband owned a gun store in Goleta long before the city incorporated in 2002, said: “You zoned me out of business, literally.” She threatened to sue the city if it enacts additional restrictions.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to enact its own 45-day moratorium on new, relocated or expanded gun stores in unincorporated Santa Barbara County while staffers draft proposed buffer zone requirements and other new regulations.

“We heard loud and clear how outraged the community was that they were unaware that Goodland Guns was able to do this without a public process,” Supervisor Laura Capps said in an email.

At the meeting, Supervisor Steve Lavagnino noted that, in his district, Santa Maria High School is directly across the street from a firearms store called Get R Gun.

“I got my gun there,” he said. “But it’s not where you want kids to be walking across the street, looking at that from their school.”

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