Newsom unveils gun initiative

James Poulos — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 12:07:02 +0000

Thrusting himself to the forefront of America’s campaign-season controversy around access to firearms, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom seized the opportunity to define the 2018 gubernatorial race early, proposing a ballot initiative that would usher in sweeping new gun laws.

Although Newsom’s liberal bona fides were not in question, analysts observed that his calculated risk to wade into the debate made sense in the context of California’s current political climate. “High-profile ballot measure campaigns can help bolster a candidate’s visibility,” as the Los Angeles Times noted. “And because of dismal voter turnout in the last California election, the threshold to qualify measures has been dropped to 365,000 petition signatures, much lower than the previous standard.”

Guns in the crosshairs

Newsom didn’t hesitate to cast himself as a champion of the anti-gun movement, capable of going head to head against the nation’s strongest firearms rights lobbies. “The NRA doesn’t own me, they haven’t bought me — and they never will. They’ve already come after us,” he said in remarks to Capital New York, a Politico publication, “and it’s going to intensify.”

Calling the National Rifle Association “extraordinarily effective at stifling the legislative process,” Newsom vowed “to fight a different fight — that is, direct democracy. We’re going directly to voters. Because the public is with us, including the NRA members themselves.”

Uncertain terrain

To an extent, Newsom has public opinion on his side in the Golden State. “A poll last month by the Public Policy Institute of California found that two-thirds of adults believe California’s gun control laws should be stricter than they are now,” USA Today reported. “It found that 57 percent of adults said controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting the right of Americans to own guns, while 40 percent said protecting gun ownership is more important.”

But Newsom was cagey on the subject of Gov. Jerry Brown, who has torpedoed California gun legislation in the recent past. His proposed initiative, the Sacramento Bee noted, incorporates “provisions of bills that have stalled at the state Capitol or were vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in recent years.” In addition to compelling sellers of bullets to be licensed in the same manner as sellers of guns, the Bee continued, Newsom’s initiative would “establish a process to seize guns from people prohibited from owning them because of their criminal records, mandate that lost or stolen guns be reported to law enforcement, and require the California Department of Justice to notify federal authorities when someone is added to the state database of prohibited firearms owners.”

Californians have already directly or indirectly established one of the strictest sets of firearms regulations in the country, with “a 10-day waiting period for all firearm purchases, an assault weapons ban, and a ban on making and selling magazines that hold more than 10 rounds,” as the San Jose Mercury News recalled. “The state enacted its assault weapons ban in 1989 and expanded it 10 years later,” the paper added, although “those who already owned the banned guns and magazines were allowed to register and keep them.”

Fueling fears

Of all the provisions proposed by Newsom, one stood out: the ban on so-called “large capacity” gun magazines. UCLA law professor Adam Winkler told the Bee that the provision would “hit a lot of ordinary gun owners where it hurts,” potentially turning gun moderates against the initiative. “It plays into the hands of gun-rights proponents who are always warning that the government is going to come take your guns,” he suggested.

In a statement, NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter promptly advanced that standpoint. “His ballot initiative proposal does nothing but prohibit access to the most effective methods for self-defense, with no measurable positive effect on stopping crime or improving public safety,” she told Courthouse News. “They can’t repeal the Second Amendment, so they’re trying to chip away our rights until there is nothing left,” she said.

Newsom begins new anti-gun campaign

CalWatchdog Staff — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 18:45:07 +0000

Dec. 15, 2012

By Katy Grimes

Immediately after the horrific and tragic school shooting in Connecticut Friday, opportunistic politicians all across the country jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon.

My CalWatchdog colleague John Seiler, thankfully also jumped on the politicians yesterday. “…it didn’t take long for gun-control advocates to take a bead on our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Seiler said. “It’s also shameful that politicians use such tragedies to advance their tyrannical agendas.”

Lt. Gov. jumps on bandwagon

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom wasted no time putting forth his next political campaign agenda. “For those calling for the postponement of any discussion of gun and mental health policy in America, you are wrong,” Newsom said, reported the Sacramento Bee, “Today is a clarion call to all leaders, regardless of political party.”

Newsom, one of the biggest opportunists in California politics, has clearly seen this tragedy as an opportunity to push forth another of his nutty ideas.

In 2007, when he was Mayor of San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Mayor Gavin Newsom quietly introduced a package of gun control measures on Tuesday that would make it illegal to possess guns on city-owned property and require residents to store handguns in locked containers.”

“We should continue our efforts to restrict the use of legal guns and we will continue our efforts to stem the tide of illegal guns,” Newsom said.

Guns don’t kill people

Guns don’t kill people. Crazy people kill people. We should stem the tide of crazy people, not guns. This big social experiment to let crazy people live among us has failed. Crazy people are like a time bomb or a loaded gun, walking down the street; we never know when they are going to go off.

SUV’s don’t run over people in a crosswalk. The idiot driver behind the wheel is responsible. We are a society run by liberals who want everyone to live together, freely – except those of us who are responsible, law-abiding citizens. The controlling laws are directed at us.

Gun control and anti-gun laws only serve to weaken citizens, while gangs and crazy people collect illegal arms. But a liberal, tyrannical government wants its citizenry to live in fear. What better way than preventing citizens from protecting themselves?

“The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to
protect themselves against tyranny in government,” Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote means more today than ever.

Criminals fear armed citizens more than they fear police. Because criminals go after the lowest point of resistance, citizens bearing arms are unpredictable.

Data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation show that America has been on a firearms buying spree since the end of 2005, PJ media reported. In 2009, the FBI released preliminary 2009 crime data indicating that violent crime has been dropping at an accelerating rate since the end of 2006.

In 1982, Kennesaw, GA passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one weapon in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89 percent in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4 percent drop in Georgia as a whole. Ten years later, in 1991, it was reported that the residential burglary rate in Kennesaw was still 72 percent lower than it had been in 1981, before the law was passed.

In Vermont, citizens can carry a firearm without getting permission, without paying a fee, and without going through any kind of government-imposed waiting period. For ten years in a row, Vermont remained one of the top-five, safest states in the union, and three times received the “Safest State Award,” which was ended in 2007.

Fifteen years following the passage of Florida’s concealed carry law in 1987, over 800,000 permits to carry firearms were issued to people in the state. FBI reports show that the homicide rate in Florida, which in 1987 was much higher than the national average, fell 52 percent during that 15-year period — thus putting the Florida rate below the national average.

The Center for Disease Control has admitted that there is no evidence that gun control reduces crime. The CDC has long been criticized for propagating questionable studies which gun control organizations have used in defense of their cause. But after analyzing 51 studies in 2003, the CDC concluded that the “evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of any of these [firearms] laws.”

Some other gun statistics:

* Guns are used 2.5 million times annually or 6,860 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than they are to take lives.

* Less than 8 percent of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.

* 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse

* Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year.

* Only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The ‘error rate’ for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.

God help any thug who breaks into my house… and it’s not just my German Shepherd and marshmallow gun to worry about.