It must be nice being a gun grabber. I mean, to know that you’re always right and to be able to look at any situation, no matter how spectacularly your policies failed, and say, “This isn’t on us. It’s on you guys!”

That’s happening right now in California following the horrific events at the Borderline Bar & Grill Wednesday night.

It seems that despite the strictest gun control in the country, the fault for the mass shootings rests not in the failure of those laws, but in the NRA and other gun rights activists.

Just hours after a deadly mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Thursday said California “can do more and do better on gun safety” and criticized the National Rifle Assn. and Republican leaders in Washington for blocking common-sense gun control.

A longtime champion for tighter restrictions on firearms, Newsom addressed the shooting in his first public appearance since his election Tuesday. He had planned to discuss his upcoming transition into the governor’s office but changed his plans after the tragedy.

“It’s [with] a heavy heart I come here a day or two after an election for governor. You want to be focused on other things,” Newsom told reporters in San Francisco, referring to the 12 people killed by a gunman, who was also found dead. “This is America. It’s got to change. This doesn’t happen anywhere else on the planet. We can’t allow this to be normalized.”

…

Newsom cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the gunman or circumstances surrounding the shooting, urging Californians to wait until the investigation takes place and more facts are known. But the Democrat said the culture of acceptance around mass shootings was abhorrent, and he criticized politicians in Washington for offering nothing “except hot air and rhetoric.”

“Suffice it to say, the response is not just prayers. The response cannot just be excuses. The response sure as hell cannot be more guns,” Newsom said. “The National Rifle Assn., I’ll say this, is bankrupt morally, and they need to be held to account for their rhetoric and for their actions.”

So, short version, Newsom wants not just to curtail your Second Amendment rights, but also your First Amendment rights as well. After all, it’s not like the NRA has encouraged shootings or done anything like that, so what rhetoric should they be held accountable for? For disagreeing about gun control?

Newsom has failed to acknowledge one very important point in all of this. This happened in California which has stricter laws than anything being considered at the national level.

It was his state that created the laws that governed the killer, and they failed. They completely failed to stop the deadly attack. Why is that?

It’s because gun control has never dissuaded a living soul from committing some atrocity if they wanted to. They will commit unspeakable acts through any means possible. In this case, the weapon used was a semi-automatic handgun, the kind that doesn’t fall under any current assault weapon ban or other legislation up for discussion.

All we see here is another politician building a soapbox out of the bodies of the dead to try and score political points. It’s ghoulish and macabre, but anti-gun politicians will keep doing it. Not because they care about the dead. It’s because they care about gun control and will grab hold of any opportunity to push that one they can find.