Gavin Newsom
"Thou shalt not challenge my limits on your gun rights!" (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

By Chuck Michel

Governor Newsom held a press conference Wednesday at which he signed almost two dozen new gun control laws all designed to make it harder and more expensive to buy or have a gun to defend yourself or your family in California. Two of those bills have gotten the most attention – Senate Bill 2 and Assembly Bill 28. Legal challenges to those two bills, and others, are already in motion.

AB 28 imposes an 11% “sin tax,” as Newsom called it, on guns and ammo. But choosing to own a gun is not a sin, and gun owners are not sinners. CRPA is working with our partners to file a lawsuit challenging this new tax on the exercise of your Second Amendment rights.

SB 2 imposes new requirements that make it harder to get a permit to carry a firearm in public, and creates dozens of new “sensitive places” where a permit is invalid. If SB 2 takes effect as scheduled on January 1, it will be practically impossible for a permit holder to cross town without passing through a gun-free zone and committing a crime in the process if the law is not struck down before then.

CRPA and its strategic partners didn’t wait for Newsom to sign SB 2 before filing a lawsuit to strike it down. The minute Nesom signed the bill CRPA’s lawyers served the state with the lawsuit. Yesterday CRPA filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the law from taking effect. Now the state has until November 3rd to file its opposition to the injunction request. CRPA will then have until November 20th to reply to the opposition. A hearing is currently scheduled before US District Court Judge Cormac Carney on December 4th.

Judge Carney presided over CRPA’s successful challenge to the “safe” handgun roster. In that case, Judge Carney granted the CRPA’s motion to preliminarily enjoin the most troublesome requirements of the Unsafe Handgun Act, which crippled the decades-old law preventing Californians from accessing the latest and safest firearm technology.

The laws that Newsom signed will not make us any safer. They are a vindictive and retaliatory response to the Supreme Court’s historic Bruen decision from last year.

The Supreme Court made it clear that governments cannot over-designate places as “sensitive” where lawful carry would be prohibited. But that is exactly what Newsom and the politicians in his pocket seek to do. They know that this bill will only affect lawful gun owners — because they are the only ones who go through the process to obtain a concealed carry license. They know that criminals will not be stopped.

Data from several states proves that Americans with concealed carry permits commit crimes at extraordinarily low rates, as the lawsuit explains. Recently, a Hawaii district court relied in part on this same data, which was presented to it by some of the same associations now challenging SB 2, to conclude that Hawaii’s similar law could be enjoined. A ruling against most of Maryland’s “sensitive places” law came out yesterday.

Designating so many places as gun-free zones is a retaliatory tactic coordinated by well-financed national gun control advocacy group Everytown Law that is being used in states hostile to gun ownership to make the right to defend yourself in public useless. California follows in the footsteps of Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Hawaii.

Federal courts in those other jurisdictions have already enjoined laws like SB 2. These rulings include: Antonyuk v. Hochul, No. 1:22-CV-0986 (GTS/CFH), 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 201944 (N.D.N.Y. Nov. 7, 2022); Koons v. Platkin, No. CV 22-7463 (RMB/AMD), 2023 WL 3478604 (D.N.J. May 16, 2023); and Wolford v. Lopez, No. CV 23-00265 LEK-WRP, 2023 WL 5043805, at *1 (D. Haw. Aug. 8, 2023).

It is an open secret in the hallways of the capital building in Sacramento that politicians hope to pass so many gun control laws that Second Amendment advocacy groups can’t keep up. Newsom has unlimited tax dollars to battle for his unconstitutional laws in court. But millions of gun owners support these legal challenges to protect their rights.

Gavin Newsom angry
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

When elected officials thumb their noses at our Constitution, CRPA and our coalition partners are proud to hold that line. Newsom thinks that he is making it more difficult to be a gun owner in California, but all he has done is facilitate an unprecedented joint effort to overturn his unconstitutional laws. There is now a strong coalition of gun owners’ rights groups fighting together against the laws that Newsom is using to push his political agenda.

Pro-Second Amendment groups joining in the lawsuit against Newsom and SB 2 are well known in the state, and many have been fighting against ill-conceived gun bans for decades. The coalition includes CRPA, Gun Owners of California, Second Amendment Foundation, individual plaintiffs include influencers Reno May and Anthony Miranda, the “Armed Scholar.” These plaintiffs bring exposure, resources, members, donors, and expertise to help us win this case.

Now CRPA needs your help. To help support this case and other cases like it, and to protect your Second Amendment rights, please join CRPA at CRPA.org and please donate here.

18 COMMENTS

  1. Is it true that Kalif-fornia has passed legislation banning the manual counting of election ballots in districts with more that 1,000 registered voters?

      • Give it a rest, Debbie Dimwit. You’ve posted that SAME video, dozens of times. It isn’t any better for your reposting it. YES, we all know that gun control BEGAN as a racist technique.

        Guess what??? The world has moved on while you were busy obsessing over that. “Gun control” is now about . . . CONTROL. Over US (having nothing to do with race).

        Why are you so stupid? Why can’t you grow TF up and recognize the real world? Why do you have to be a stupid parrot, and keep saying the SAME, irrelevant sh*te that you say, EVERY FREAKIN’ TIME??

        Don’t go away mad, Debbie Dimwit, just go away . . . far, far away, and never come back.

        • “Don’t go away mad, Debbie Dimwit, just go away….”

          There are always new people visiting, and lingering at/on TTAG; people who are ignorant of the racist origins of gun control. The people might be the elusive unicorns (the “silent majority”), often spoken of as a potential force to turn progressives (communists and the like) against the leftists who value being anti-racists.

          And, when fully identified as being insincere about their beliefs, will vote against gun control laws, in order to keep their public reputation as anti-racists. Kinda like a version of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” number 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

          Maybe Debbie serves a purpose for those unicorns who mystically stumble across TTAG.

  2. Wasnt it Clinton who put a “Sin Tax ” on tobacco, ironic he played with cuban cigars ehh.
    The Kings rules only apply to the peasants.
    To uphold the Constitution to the best of my ability.
    theBiden with the fire in his eye and vehement disgust in his voice for those “American Patriots” who will need F16’S and nukes to take on His? military.
    We are getting old boy’s and our youth are more worried about what’s on Tik Tok then the future of their country.
    Hopefully the illegal immigrants will step up and fight for Freedom, ugh coughing up chunks of lung on that one I got to laughing so hard.
    Well 2024 is almost here, that’s going to make a Reeeeal big difference, my ass, like Swiggie said the other day, ” Here comes the old boss/ same as the old boss.”
    Seasons change, politics do not.

    • “Clinton who put a “Sin Tax ” on tobacco“

      Tobacco should be taxed based on it’s cost to our society:

      “Results:
      In 2014, there were an estimated 461,295 annual tobacco-related cancer hospitalizations at a cost of $8.2 billion in the U.S. Tobacco-related cancers accounted for 45% of total cancer hospitalizations and cancer hospitalization costs. Compared with cancer hospitalizations not related to tobacco, tobacco-related cancer hospitalizations had a longer mean length of stay (6.8 vs 5.7 days).

      Conclusions:

      The burden of tobacco-related cancer hospitalizations is substantial in the U.S. These findings highlight the importance of tobacco prevention and cessation efforts to decrease the burden of tobacco-related cancers in the U.S.“

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080196/

      • liar49er now do doctors and swimming pools and glass table tops just for starters. Let’s tax all of them because they all cause a lot of injuries.
        How about we tax lying leftists like you just for being annoying.

        • …and abortions. How many potential taxpayers have been killed off over the years, as opposed to being allowed to grow up and become contributing members of society? Not enough $$ coming in for social security to remain solvent? Wonder why…

  3. It’s amazing to see history repeat itself or rhyme as some people say. Over Sixty years ago, you had states passing anti-civil rights laws in reaction to a supreme court decision.

    And now once again, you have states passing anti-civil rights laws in reaction to a supreme court decision.
    But sixty years ago, the military was sent in to deal with these rebellious states.

    Now on the twenty first century, you’re not going to have federal troops sent into these states to deal with this rebellion.
    The gun community has been saying forever that you are on your own, and that is very true.

    National divorce is the solution.

    And it doesn’t have to be violent. It doesn’t require any troop deployments. We simply go our separate ways.

    The big difference from today versus sixty years ago. The states in rebellion believed in the rule of law. Eventually they followed the law.

    And now in the 21st century, the states in rebellion really do not believe in the rule law.

    • “it doesn’t have to be violent. It doesn’t require any troop deployments. We simply go our separate ways.”

      That was the plan (or useless hope) in 1860.

      The Constitution provides no peaceful, legal, constitutional mechanism, for states to withdraw from the union.

      • Wouldn’t matter if there was, with few exceptions and often not the ones you would think pretty much all states and regions are heavily dependent on each other and would if not collapse have near insurmountable difficulty in providing all infrastructure logistics and trade needs to keep things limping along. That is assuming it remains peaceful and sabotage, embargo, and outright invasion do not become factors. Now that I think on it perhaps the weird degenerate stuff is being pushed as a way of creating a common enemy for future use in ensuring territorial integrity.

        • Agree. The many who proclaim “national divorce” have not thought things through. The general theme seems to be that if the rebellious states cause enough damage to the tyrant states, then the tyrants would surrender, and acquiesce to a nation structured as the rebels would demand.

  4. Why do the people in California keep voting for deranged people like their governor who wastes taxpayer money on stupid anti-gun laws, rather than to use the money to handle all the floods and wildfires that continue to plague what was formerly a beautiful state. I would bet that the owners of those multi-million dollar estate homes, for which the governor allowed to burn to the ground, won’t be voting for him in the future. But he doesn’t need their votes, when he has the votes from thousands of poor people who he gives free handouts.

    • As with bears, coyotes, wolves et el, politicians do what politicians do. I don’t worry about politicians nearly as much as the free-shit addicted Government Plantation Dwellers who vote politicians into power.

  5. LoD
    Since the media and the libidiots are always going on and on about the NRA being the face of the ‘gun industry,’ I would like her to focus on how the NRA was one of the FIRST civil rights organizations in the US, since she wants to keep pounding on the ‘racist’ angle…

    Specifically, how they were helping to train the newly freed slaves in the use of firearms to defend against the >DemoKKKrats< that were trying to keep the status quo by doing all that 'wonderful Klan stuff,' and point out that the DemoKKKrats today are doing their level best to have all that erased from the history books.

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