A gun store opens next door to a Santa Barbara County day care, infuriating families. Will it change laws?

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Set us as preferred 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 day-care 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 UC 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 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 da...