Gavin Newsom is shocked to learn that people might think he’s hostile toward the right to keep and bear arms. During a recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Ryan surprised Newsom with a gift, a SIG Sauer P365 XMACRO.
“You know what,” said Newsom, “the last thing people would expect is that I respect this gift.” He soon added, “I’m not anti-gun at all.” He even said, “I’m also deeply mindful and respectful of the Second Amendment and people’s constitutional rights.”
So, he is so respectful of the Second Amendment that he wants to repeal it?
This is not hyperbole. Newsom is, quite literally, trying to repeal the Second Amendment. Back in 2008, when he was mayor of San Francisco, he signed an amicus brief on behalf of the city that argued that the Second Amendment protected no individual right at all. More recently, he has proposed adding a 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban the most-popular rifle in America, allow the federal government to superintend all firearms transfers, impose a national waiting period and, by introducing the meaningless term “common sense” into the nation’s founding charter, turn an individual right into a dead letter in the courts. It is true, as Newsom says, that “the last thing people would expect” is that he is pro-gun, and there is an unassailable reason for that perception: He’s not.
Nor did Newsom really “respect” the gift he was given. People who “respect” things do not try to banish them from their states. Per California state representative Carl DeMaio (R), Newsom was ultimately unable to accept the gift because the rules in California are so convoluted that he was left unable to work out whether he could legally bring it in. And he’s the governor! Certainly, it is true that not all of California’s laws were put in place while Newsom was in charge. It is also true that he has tried to repeal none of the restrictions that have now caught him out, and, in fact, that he has made many of them worse. Smiling on TV is easy enough—and Gavin Newsom is pretty good at that. It is not, however, even close to the same thing as being “mindful and respectful” of “people’s constitutional rights.”
Sadly, Newsom is not alone in his penchant for deception. Indeed, pretending to favor the Second Amendment while attempting to destroy it has become the go-to move for ambitious politicians who understand that their preference for radical gun-control is an impediment to their electoral chances. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz all insisted that they were supportive of the right to keep and bear arms while proposing a series of laws that would have hollowed it out. Walz, in particular, was fond of saying “I believe in the Second Amendment, but ... .” This is a phrase that brings to mind the excellent advice to listen carefully to what people are actually arguing, and, when evaluating their platitudes, to assiduously “ignore everything that came before the ‘but.’”
That even our most fervently anti-gun politicians feel the need to pay lip service to the Second Amendment is preferable to the alternative, infuriating as it may be to watch; after all, whenever an anti-Second Amendment figure insists that they support it, they are implicitly confirming that it is cherished by a supermajority. Whatever they say, ultimately, the proof is in the doing.
On Shawn Ryan’s show, Gavin Newsom smiled and smarmed and sucked up to the host, but, try as he might, he could not get away from his reprehensible record—and, deep down, he must have known in that moment that all of us could see straight through him.
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