On this week’s “In Focus SoCal,” host Tayna McRae sits down with California Assembly member Chris Holden, who has represented the 41st District for over a decade. The Pasadena native served on the City Council and as mayor before being elected to the state Assembly in 2012. Holden looked back at his childhood attending the public school system in Pasadena. 

“It’s a great community to have grown up in, a very centralized part of the city where we had a large population in those days of African American communities. And so the schools and the neighborhoods, we always had family around, it seemed,” Holden said.

The San Diego State University graduate, who played basketball throughout his college career, is advocating for the College Athlete Protection Act, which would establish safety standards to prevent abuse, serious injury and death among athletes. AB 252 passed the Higher Education Committee in April, and aims to provide a pathway toward fair college athlete compensation that is conditional upon degree completion to improve graduation rates.

“This really came about sort of understanding and underscoring just how important it is to continue the efforts of recognizing that college athletes find themselves, quite frankly, in many situations where their health can be jeopardized. They could have a serious injury that would impact on their ability to continue to play the sport, and thereby sometimes putting their college completion in jeopardy,” Holden said.

The assembly member discussed the need for stronger gun legislation in the wake of dozens of mass shootings across the country in 2023, including one in Monterey Park in January that took the lives of 11 people. Holden said California has been aggressive and progressive in terms of addressing the issue of gun safety, but that too many guns are coming in from other states. He said states need to work together to curb gun violence.

“Our neighboring states can maybe look at some forms of joint legislation, so that we are expanding our coverage on good policies that make it universally, at least in terms of regions of the country, operating on the same policies and stricter guidelines.”

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