BELLEVUE, WA – California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of extremist gun control measures Tuesday amounts to a giant leap backwards from protecting public safety and the rights of law-abiding citizens, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.
“Gavin Newsom continues to blame gun owners for problems he is not addressing as the state’s chief executive,” said CCRKBA Managing Director Andrew Gottlieb. “Instead of cracking down on law-abiding gun owners by signing Senate Bill 2, which restricts lawful concealed carry, and Assembly Bill 2, creating an 11 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition, he should be focusing his attention on the people committing crimes.”
Gottlieb said both measures are likely to be found unconstitutional, but in the meantime, Golden State residents will be penalized for crimes they didn’t commit.
“It is no wonder,” Gottlieb said, “why so many Californians have moved to other states, such as Texas and Florida, because they are tired of being scapegoated by a governor who is hell bent on making headlines instead of progress. His crazy policies are simply out of touch with reality.”
Gottlieb quoted CCRKBA Board Member Cam Edwards, who wrote, “Of course, it’s gun owners, not guns that these bills are cracking down on. (Attorney General Rob) Bonta claimed that the right to carry increases violent crime by 29%, even though violent crime rates have plunged across the country for the past 30 years even as a majority of states have adopted first shall-issue and now permitless carry laws.”
“Newsom’s preoccupation with penalizing honest gun owners with a special tax and placing ridiculous restrictions on where they can legally carry firearms, strikes us as one more attempt to turn a fundamental right into a government-regulated privilege,” Gottlieb observed. “All he has done is open the door to a truckload of civil rights litigation, which will not distract anybody from seeing how his policies are turning California into a third-world disaster.”