LOS ANGELES — At Turner's Outdoorsman in Torrance, racks of long guns line the back wall under taxidermied deer and antelope heads. On Sunday afternoon, shoppers browsed for fishing poles and sifted through a wide array of camouflage hunting gear.

It could have been a scene straight out of a gun store in rural Utah or Alabama, but instead it was in a nondescript strip mall on a busy stretch of Hawthorne Boulevard, steps away from a nail salon and a Cold Stone Creamery ice cream shop.

For those who perceive Los Angeles County as a difficult place to obtain a firearm, due to state and local regulations, it may come as a surprise that the man charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump reportedly purchased his firearms in L.A.'s South Bay.

Cole Tomas Allen, who authorities say rushed a banquet room at the White House correspondents' dinner on Saturday night, had legally bought a 12-gauge shotgun at the Turner's location in his hometown of Torrance, as well as a semiautomatic pistol at CAP Tactical Firearms in neighboring Lawndale.

The shooting has left the city of Torrance reeling, with neighbors and co-workers voicing astonishment at how a well-regarded tutor with a mechanical engineering degree from Caltech could be accused of such a crime. Allen lived with his parents — both educators — on a quiet street in a middle-class neighborhood.

"Torrance is a community built on respect, diversity, hard work, and public safety," Torrance Mayor George K. Chen said on X. "Our community joins the nation in condemning the violent incident that occurred in Washington, D.C."

Southwest L.A. County — and Torrance in particular — has a well-established reputation as being a relatively gun-friendly area within a more broadly pro-gun-control county and region.

Torrance was home to 18 firearm dealers as of November 2023, as The Times has reported. That's approximately one dealer for every 8,150 residents of the South Bay city, which has a population of around 147,000 people.

Meanwhile, across the entirety of Los Angeles County, there were about 350 licensed gun dealers as of 2023, of which only 38 were in the city of L.A., home to nearly 4 million people, or one for every 100,000 or so residents.

At the local level, laws and practices regulating gun dealers can vary widely from city to city. Burbank approved a temporary moratorium on new gun dealers in 2022 after concerns emerged about the concentration of shops there following that year's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In 2024, the Burbank City Council instituted "buffer zones" between gun stores and certain locations, including schools and churches.

Even Torrance has taken steps to rein in gun dealers. In 2022, as The Times reported, Jack Brandhorst, owner of a gun store called Red Rifle Ltd., attempted to obtain a city permit that would allow him to move his store to downtown Torrance from nearby Carson. The Planning Commission denied the permit after a heated hearing that brought out dozens of pro- and anti-gun-control activists. Brandhorst appealed and the City Council voted 6 to 1 to uphold the denial.

"These City Council people placated to the squeaky wheels," Brandhorst said after the council hearing. "There's no law or rule that limits gun stores in that area."

In May 2023, the council approved a new regulation stating that a range of establishments, including check-cashing shops, drive-through restaurants and gun dealers, were no longer allowed in Torrance's quaint downtown, though they remained welcome to set up shop in many other areas of the city.

Yet gun dealers are still not an uncommon sight in shopping centers and commercial districts in much of the South Bay. In Torrance, an alarming number of those guns end up being used in crimes.

Between 2017 and 2021, Torrance dealers sold the third-most crime guns later recovered in Los Angeles of any municipality in the nation, The Times reported. Officials define crime guns as firearms that have been stolen or are illegally possessed, have been used in a crime, or are suspected of having been used in a crime.

Torrance ranked behind only much larger Las Vegas and Phoenix, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Also, during the same period, over 700 of the crime guns recovered in L.A. had been purchased at Torrance gun dealers.

Between Jan. 1, 2010, and Dec. 31, 2022, the Turner's Outdoorsman location in Torrance sold 1,652 crime guns, according to the 2023 report by the California Department of Justice. CAP Tactical Firearms sold 150 crime guns over that period.

An employee at the Torrance location of Turner's Outdoorsman referred questions to Bill Ortiz, the company's senior vice president.

"We exercise a long-standing policy where we discuss any potential law enforcement related information, if/when that ever occurs, directly with law enforcement authorities only," Ortiz said in an emailed statement Sunday.

CAP Tactical was closed on Sunday and Monday and a call requesting comment was not returned by Monday afternoon.

In conversations with The Times, Allen's neighbors and acquaintances in Torrance described him as quiet, smart and unassuming. People who knew some of his tutoring students said they described him as intelligent and skilled at mathematics and science.

Allen allegedly penned a manifesto in which he listed administration officials as targets for assassination. The manifesto also referenced Christianity overtly and indirectly, such as by stating that "Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor's crimes." Trump, for his part, described Allen as "sick" and said that Allen "hates Christians" in an interview with Fox News over the weekend.

At Caltech, those who knew Allen have said he was involved in the Caltech Christian Fellowship. A 2016 posting on the fellowship's website appeared to identify him as "large group coordinator."

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Times staff writers Alene Tchekmedyian, Richard Winton and Tony Briscoe contributed to this report.

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