Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) echoed President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) gun control push by calling for national passage of the same laws that have been failing to stop high profile shootings in California for more than 30 years.
Breitbart News reported that during the SOTU, Biden demanded an “assault weapons” ban and universal background checks. California has had an “assault weapons” ban since 1989 and universal background checks since 1991, yet the state has also been ground zero for some of the most high profile shootings the U.S. has seen.
US President Joe Biden, during a State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, March 7, 2024 (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Just a few of those high profile shootings are:
- The Santa Barbara attack (6 killed on May 23, 2014)
- The San Bernardino attack (14 killed on December 2, 2015)
- Yountville Veterans Home of California attack (4 killed on March 9, 2018)
- Thousand Oaks Borderline Bar and Grill attack (12 killed on November 7, 2018)
- Orange, California, VTA Line attack (9 killed on March 31, 2021)
- Downtown Sacramento attack (6 killed on April 3, 2022)
- Goshen attack (6 killed on January 16, 2023)
- Monterey Park attack (11 killed on January 21, 2023)
- Half Moon Bay attack (7 killed on January 23, 2023)
Shootings have become so common in California that on June 22, 2023, the Public Policy Institute of California noted, “Attacks that injure or kill at least four people have begun to inch up: in 2023, Californians have experienced a mass shooting every six days.”
Despite the impotence of an “assault weapons” ban and universal checks against such shootings, Newsom pushed for them nationally on Thursday night:
We need a national ban on assault weapons.
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 8, 2024
We need universal background checks.
We also need to raise the age to purchase a gun to 21 and have a standard waiting period.@POTUS is right.
It’s why we need to pass a Constitutional Amendment to get this done.
Time to enact a…
Newsom mentioned a waiting period in his X post, which is another gun control in California that failed to prevent the shootings listed above. California already has a ten-day waiting period on all gun purchases.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
