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Gun Controllers Can't Stop Fibbing About California's Carry Restrictions

AP Photo/Alex Gallardo, Pool

The gun control lobby doesn’t just distrust their fellow Americans to own guns. It’s become increasingly and painfully obvious that they don’t trust us with the truth either.

Take this recent post on X/Twitter from California Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowing an injunction that blocks enforcement of many of California’s newly-imposed “gun-free zones”.

Do you know who else allowed guns to be carried at playgrounds, libraries, and hospitals in the state? The California legislature, right up until the Democratic supermajority voted to enact bans in these supposedly sensitive places; not decades ago but just a few months after the Supreme Court declared that states like California couldn’t use arbitrary and subjective determinations like a “justifiable need” or “good cause” to approve or deny carry permits.

None of these places were off-limits to concealed carry holders before January 1st. It’s the extremists in Sacramento who insisted that the right to carry should be limited to a few streets and sidewalks in the state, while banning the constitutionally-protected practice from almost every publicly accessible space in direct defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Newsom’s not the only one engaging in a verbal temper tantrum over the Ninth Circuit’s decision, which will likely keep enforcement on hold for at least the next few months. Women Against Gun Violence offered up this bit of word salad on X earlier today:

Schools were not one of the “sensitive places” challenged by the plaintiffs in May v. Bonta and Carralero v. Bonta, so the prohibition on concealed carry on school grounds remains in effect. But can Women (or WoMen) Against Gun Violence explain why, exactly, it’s reasonable to negate a woman’s right to defend herself from a violent attack when she steps on a city bus or walks through a public park, even after she’s gone through the extensive screening process to obtain a carry license?

Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros made a great point about this when he joined me on Cam & Co earlier this week. Even though the state’s “may issue” laws have been struck down, obtaining a carry license isn’t exactly easy to do in California. You’re not only going to have to go through a background check and provide proof of training, but depending on where you live you may be subject to a psychological screening, provide character references, and sit for an in-person interview with law enforcement before you can be approved. Yet even after running that bureaucratic gauntlet and being approved for a carry license, the state wants to make it impossible for you to actually put that permit to use. It doesn’t matter how vetted or trained a citizen might be. As far as the gun control crowd is concerned no one, save perhaps their own pals and (maybe) police, are responsible enough to bear arms in public.

Yes, law-abiding (not sure why WoMen Against Gun Violence decided to put that in quotes) gun owners continue to block unreasonable laws that infringe on their right to keep and bear arms, leading to fewer laws they must follow. That’s what happens when people successfully fight for their civil rights. If Twitter or X had been around in the 1960s we would have seen groups like the White Citizens Council bemoaning people like John Lewis or Roy Innis who dared to challenge Jim Crow laws barring them from eating at the same lunch counter as a white person or sitting beside a Caucasian on a Greyhound bus. Now it’s gun control groups who are wringing their hands over the fact that courts across the country are shooting down their attempts to enshrine their anti-2A bigotry into state and federal law.

There is nothing reasonable about telling a lawful gun owner that they can’t carry in a public park, a parking lot, or any other place deemed “sensitive” though it lacks any additional security precautions, especially when we know that those with violent intentions will simply ignore that prohibition. There’s no common sense in demanding citizens be defenseless in places where they’re at risk of being the victim of an armed robbery, carjacking, or random assault. And there’s no honesty involved when they claim that “extremist judges” are to blame for these rulings when it’s their own prejudices that led to the creation of the laws that are now falling under legal scrutiny.

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