California is a gun-grabber’s paradise.

They’ve got all kinds of gun control laws, everything anti-gunners want on the federal level and a whole host of measures that will never see the light of day in Washington, DC.

Gov. Gavin Newsom even realizes this, which is why his proposed constitutional amendment only seeks to codify a handful of anti-gun laws into our Constitution, apparently not realizing that it’s a de facto admission that those measures aren’t constitutional as things currently stand.

But Newsom’s anti-gun efforts aren’t universally beloved in California, either. Especially Newsom’s carry restrictions that are currently at the heart of a legal challenge.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who is concerned about the surge in crime, told Fox News he was relieved the court blocked Newsom’s most recent effort to control gun laws.

“The fact about everything we’re doing taking away the gun rights and ownership and the [carrying a concealed weapon] aspect of the whole thing, where you can carry and where you can’t, it flies in the face of what they do with criminals,” Bianco said.

…

“They have a very pro-criminal stance in California, and they have for years, all of the laws. Newsom’s goal is to close as many prisons as he can, to not prosecute and to not sentence anyone to state prison,” Bianco said. “They blame law enforcement. They blame society. So there’s never a personal responsibility on someone’s criminal behavior. It’s always someone else’s fault.”

Bianco isn’t wrong, either.

Obviously, we’re biased here. We don’t favor gun control in any form, especially like California is trying to do; a way where the lawful carry of firearms becomes so impractical as to be nonexistent.

Yet the criminal element in California has never really bothered with things like laws.

We know this definitively because California has always had restrictive gun laws, particularly around things like concealed carry. Your average person couldn’t get a permit in many place in the state, yet criminals were never bothered by that fact. They carried guns regardless of the laws in place.

Couple that with criminal justice reform efforts that seem to basically boil down to prosecuting as few people as possible, even for crimes where there are victims and what you have is a recipe for disaster.

Which the state seems to be experiencing.

This idea that disarming law-abiding citizens will somehow result in criminal disarmament is one of the most bizarre notions anti-gunners have, and yet it persists year after year. California is a prime example of how little that actually accomplishes, but they continue to delude themselves into believing this to be the case.

Bianco called it, and since he’s sheriff in a county with nearly 2.5 million residents–and we know that more people tends to correlate to more support for gun control–this could be signaling a shift in how the Golden State views things.

While I doubt California is about to turn pro-gun, we might start to see a great deal more pushback on the idea of infringing still further on people’s Second Amendment rights.

If so, it’s about time.