To get elected to statewide office in California, you pretty much have to support gun control. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a driving force for you, but you’ve got to back it to some degree. There’s really no other way to appeal to the liberal masses in the state’s large cities.

When we talk about those cities, San Diego isn’t usually the first place we think of. After all, this is a state with Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Yet San Diego has become very and vehemently anti-gun.

Now, the California attorney general is urging other cities to follow San Diego’s lead on red flag orders:

Attorney General Rob Bonta was in San Diego Thursday talking about gun violence, but his message was to the rest of the state: Be like San Diego.

“Why? Red flag laws are what allows a court to temporarily take away someone’s firearm if they are potentially dangerous. San Diegans are taking advantage of this.

I’ve traveled to San Diego today to highlight the good work that is happening in this city,” Bonta said. “That is helping us turn the tide”

Bonta is praising San Diego’s use of a red flag law called a gun violence restraining order, or GVRO. In the last five years, there’s been 900 issued in the county.

“Thirty-two percent of all gun violence restraining orders issued statewide were issued in this county, Bonta said. “That’s right, 32% of all gun restraining orders were issued right here despite San Diego County being just around 8% of California’s total population.”

He said San Diego has a team dedicated to helping community members with filing a GVRO.

“They can be confusing, but law enforcement and others can help demystify the tool so that it’s being utilized the way it was designed and intended to save lives throughout the state,” Bonta said.

Now, please tell me I’m not the only one who sees this as troubling.

We have a state’s attorney general urging cities to infringe on the constitutionally protected rights of its citizens far more often than they already do. I get that people like Bonta don’t see it that way, but that’s precisely what’s happening.

And his defense is really just that San Diego is home to a third of the total red flag orders issued? Seriously?

This is one of many problems with red flag laws. Anti-gun lawmakers create a law that takes guns from people, but the only metric they ever use to justify the law is how often it’s used.

Never mind that the homicide rate in San Diego went up 8 percent in 2021–California’s red flag law was passed in 2020–which suggests that it really didn’t stop that much violence. Especially since the city’s crime rate had been trending downward, though slowly, for years before the law was passed.

Honestly, though, that’s not even what Bonta is talking about. All he’s really saying is that this one city has used the hell out of red flag orders and other cities should too, but why?

I mean, isn’t it just as possible that San Diego is overusing them, compared to the rest of the state? If a third of all GVROs are coming out of one city, it stands to reason that you should at least consider that city might be doing something weird.

But nope. When your only metric of value is how often such orders are issued, nothing else matters.

Heaven forbid that it turns out Los Angeles and San Francisco just don’t have that many people who would supposedly warrant such an order or anything.

To be perfectly honest, San Diego isn’t a role model on this, but when the state tries to do everything it can to inhibit law-abiding citizens from exercising their right to keep and bear arms, it’s not surprising that they’d hold this up as a good thing.