Hardly a week goes by without some lefty public official saying something on a major issue that is so far from the real-world facts Americans deal with every day that it leaves you wondering how anybody could be so removed from realty.
Today’s Exhibit A is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the would-be 2028 Democratic presidential nominee despite the fact that under his long-running administration the Golden State has compiled a soaring poverty rate, confiscatory tax rates, and hundreds of thousands of taxpayers fleeing to Texas, Florida, Arizona and other free states.
Even so, Newsom is rarely bashful about delivering some nescient pronouncement on current issues and personalities and, as Just Facts Daily points out, the Supreme Court’s Wolford v. Lopez decision striking down Hawaii’s anti-conceal-carry law proved irresistible to the former San Fransisco mayor:
“Gun laws keep people safe. This ruling by Trump’s Supreme Court will only endanger people. If Justice Alito really thinks people need guns to go to the grocery store ‘for self-defense,’ this country is truly broken,” Newsom declared in a tweet.
One wonders how many years it’s been since Newsom personally entered and shopped in a neighborhood grocery store. And it appears Newsom wasn’t terribly familiar with the specifics of the Hawaii law struck down by the court as a violation of the right to keep and bear arms for individual self-defense.
Four years ago, the High Court held in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution guarantee the individual right to be armed for self-defense purposes.
To get around that decision, Hawaii revised its law to make carrying illegal in a lengthy list of specific public places, including grocery stores. In response, the Court’s opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, observed that:
“This law departs sharply from the standard common-law rule on access to private property held open to the public. Under that rule, everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so.
“By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization. The effect of this new rule is to impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit.
“When these permit holders leave home in the morning, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats”
Therefore, the Court held the revised Hawaii statute “violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms” because it imposes “severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit.”
Thus Newsom’s jab at Alito and reference to grocery stores. And, here courtesy of JFD, are the facts Newsom either doesn’t know or chose to ignore, beginning with these two gems:
- As the governor of California, Newsom receives around-the-clock “Dignitary Protection” from the California Highway Patrol.
- In 2024, Newsom was shopping with his security detail at a Target store, which became a public incident because he witnessed a shoplifting that the clerk blamed on “the governor” and his soft-on-crime policies.
But wait! There is more, much more, as there always is with the California chief executive:
- An analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at about 1/10th the rate of police, and police commit crimes at roughly 1/37 the rate of the general public.
- Since 1999, an average of about 18,000 murders per year were committed in the United States, and roughly 5% of them took place in a “commercial or retail area” and another 5% in a “parking lot, public garage, or public transport,” amounting to about 47,000 such murders.
In other words, approximately 47,000 murders occurred in commercial areas, including grocery stores, and in the parking lots, public garages and public transport used by the most of the customers in those establishments at the time of the crimes.
That means thousands of Americans during the past seven years found themselves in situations in which they may well have not lost their lives had they been carrying a firearm which they were competent to use effectively and safely. And were they thus equipped, they would have been among the most law-abiding citizens in the country.
The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 “defensive gun uses” nationwide, and it is certainly reasonable to assume many, if not most, of those situations involved individuals with the kind of concealed-carry permits Hawaii banned. And those that did not nevertheless demonstrate the huge importance of protecting the right of individual Americans to keep and bear defense arms.
The JFD analysis of Newsom’s comment further reinforced this vital fact by pointing to a 2013 study mandated by then-President Barack Obama that found “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million.” The difference between the Obama-mandated analysis and the NCVS is the latter focuses only on cases in which the victims can be individually interviewed.
There is also a hugely important constitutional argument involved in this case, which JFD summarized as follows:
- No Democrat-appointed Supreme Court justice has ever ruled that the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is actually a right of the people.
- Instead, they argued that it only applies to individuals enlisted in a “well-regulated militia,” which they claim are the state National Guard units.
- Dictionaries from the era in which the Second Amendment was written use the term “well-regulated” as a synonym for “orderly” and “methodical,” including examples like “well regulated time-pieces,” “well-regulated standing army,” “well regulated sober spirit,” “well-regulated diet,” and “well regulated family.”
- An encyclopedia and a dictionary from the era in which the Second Amendment was written document that “militia” includes all citizens “who arm themselves, upon a short warning, for their own defense.”
- In all other places where the Constitution uses the phrase “right of the people,” there is universal agreement that these rights apply to the people, not just government employees.
- James Madison, the primary author of the 2nd Amendment, wrote that “being armed” is an “advantage” that “Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
- Jacob Howard, the U.S. senator who introduced the 14th Amendment, stated that its primary purpose is to “restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect” the “personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution,” including “the right to keep and to bear arms.”
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