Democrats and the establishment attack and distort the U.S. Constitution because they loathe the idea of restraints on their power.
The Second Amendment, of course, constitutes the ultimate restraint in the hands of the sovereign people.
The sovereign people, therefore, had cause to rejoice Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney issued a temporary injunction blocking an odious California gun-control law that he called “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court” according to Fox News.
California’s ponderous Senate Bill 2 effectively would have eviscerated an individual’s constitutional right to carry firearms by expanding the catalog of “sensitive places” susceptible to state regulation.
Those “sensitive places” would have included nearly anywhere human beings go in public.
For instance, the Los Angeles Times noted that the restrictions would have applied “on public transportation, at public gatherings and special events, in parks and at playgrounds, in stadiums and arenas and casinos, in medical facilities, religious institutions or financial institutions, anywhere … liquor is sold and consumed, in all other private commercial spaces where the owner has not explicitly posted a sign to the contrary, and in many parking areas, among other places.”
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California — a notorious anti-Second Amendment tyrant — signed the repellent law in September. It would have taken effect Jan. 1.
“Defying common sense, this ruling outrageously calls California’s data-backed gun safety efforts ‘repugnant,’” Newsom said in a statement according to the Times.
“What is repugnant is this ruling, which greenlights the proliferation of guns in our hospitals, libraries, and children’s playgrounds — spaces which should be safe for all,” the anti-gun governor added.
Is Newsom the worst governor in America?
Thankfully, the California Rifle and Pistol Association challenged the law in court and won the preliminary injunction.
Association president Chuck Michel denounced Newsom and others while praising Carney.
“California progressive politicians refuse to accept the Supreme Court’s mandate from the Bruen case and are trying every creative ploy they can imagine to get around it,” Michel said in a statement according to Fox News.
“The Court saw through the State’s gambit,” he added.
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a crucial opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, et al. v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, et al.
At issue in Bruen (as the case came to be known) was New York state’s draconian anti-gun law that prohibited a citizen from carrying a concealed firearm outside the home without a special license obtained only by showing “proper cause,” i.e. “a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”
According to the Supreme Court, New York’s tyrants managed to violate two constitutional amendments at once.
“New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense,” the Bruen case syllabus read.
In short, California’s Senate Bill 2 tried to avoid the “proper-cause requirement,” but it did so simply by shifting focus from individuals to locations.
Imagine, for instance, applying the (now-invalidated) New York and California standards to the First Amendment.
Under the New York standard, individuals would have to show government officials a “special need” to speak freely in public.
In California, individuals would preserve the right to speak freely except in places where they might find other people.
Either instance would produce absurdity and intolerable government tyranny. Even in an age of brazen censorship, one cannot imagine establishment politicians like Newsom going that far to destroy freedom of speech.
But they go that far with the Second Amendment. They have no constitutional power to do so, but they do it anyway — or at least they try.
Thanks to Carney and a handful of good judges, the tyrants do not yet have unchecked power.
