While a lot of people have come into 2024 singing “New year, new me,” it’s pretty clear that California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t one of them.

Instead, he started 2024 just like he spent much of 2023: Calling for gun control.

Let’s make 2024 the year we save more lives.

Smart gun laws work.

Time to pass a Constitutional Amendment that will prevent gun violence and save lives across the country. https://t.co/eeYxe1Uuro

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) January 1, 2024

So he’s pushing that constitutional amendment again. Shocking, right?

California has all of those measures in place. Everything in the amendment Newsom wants to see ratified is already the law in the Golden State.

Which is why this response from Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros is absolute perfection.

GVA's first "mass shooting" of the year was in California. https://t.co/a51ddMiuxt pic.twitter.com/EigJu0IeOh

— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) January 1, 2024

Wait, what?

Yep. Newsom’s California had the first shooting that met Gun Violence Archive’s definition of a mass shooting–a definition that Newsom tends to use pretty readily himself.

Gunfire erupted at a New Year’s party in downtown Los Angeles leaving two people dead and eight others hospitalized.

Police responded Monday around 1 a.m. to an assault with a deadly weapon call at the gathering in the 2300 block of Porter Street.

…

“At this time, we have two confirmed fatalities,” Whiteman said. The victims were described as a male and a female who were in their 20s.

Let’s not forget that last year started off with two California mass shootings within a couple of days. So far, this year doesn’t seem to be shaping up a whole lot better.

Now, admittedly, this doesn’t meet the definition of a mass shooting most people actually use, but it does meet the one the governor tends to use.

If all of those measures worked the way they’re advertised to work, then why is it that the only “mass shooting” as of me writing this is one in Los Angeles?

Or, could it be that gun control doesn’t actually address the underlying problems and instead just lets politicians feel like they’re addressing the issue without actually addressing the issue.

Newsom’s post on X is just more of the anti-gun side’s insistence that their delusion represents reality. We’ve looked at numerous issues with the “evidence” they’ll cite, but rather than improve the science so those issues, they just ignore the problem and hope no one else will notice.

California’s gun control didn’t stop the mass shootings of 2023 and it won’t stop the mass shootings of 2024.

What’s worse is that California probably has the resources to actually do something useful. They could probably fund research into what makes someone become a mass shooter. They could fund the legwork that would lead to an actual, useful understanding of this horrific phenomenon.

But they won’t.

Newsom wants to be president. He’s positioning himself as the anti-gun candidate whenever he actually does run. That’s what this whole push is about.

Either that or he’s an even bigger idiot than I thought he was.

There’s no way such an amendment is going to be ratified. I’m not even sure the gun control crowd would want this amendment ratified if they really start to think about it.

But Newsom will push it anyway.

If gun control is going to be sold that way, though, Newsom has work to do. First and foremost, he needs to take care of the mess–the failures of gun control–in his own back yard before he pushes this fiasco on the rest of us.