California Governor Gavin Newsom is, if I’m being nice and charitable, a horrible governor. He’s presided over rampant crime and economic decline in California, a state with an economy bigger than many countries in the world.
As you likely know, Newsom is rabidly anti-gun (unless they’re being carried by his security team to protect him). He’s also happily signed stricter gun control legislation in California which hasn’t reduced the crime rate there.
Newsom seems intelligent, so, you’d think that he would know the truth about how gun control doesn’t decrease murder rates, violent crime rates, or even crime rates in general, but just the opposite.
Maybe he’s too busy trying to look like Ken from a Barbie cartoon to actually help the people of California.
Newsom even went after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis after DeSantis signed constitutional carry legislation in Florida, making Florida the 26th state in the U.S. to have, effectively, constitutional carry (some states use different terminology for it, but the effect is, basically, the same). Yes, over half of the states in the U.S. are, now, constitutional carry states.
And Newsm being so blind in his left-wing political rhetoric, including his anti-gun stances, seems oblivious to the impact those policies are having on his state’s economy and on his political future.
What has that effect been? John Seiler writes,
The Net Domestic Migration numbers are for the period April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2022. The data is from the U.S. Census Bureau as conveniently laid out by Wikipedia. I added whether a state is Constitutional Carry or soon will be in Florida’s case.
The total comes to 1,929,551 Americans moving from Shall Carry states to Constitutional Carry states, a huge number in just two years. The biggest exodus, of course, is 871,127 fleeing Newsom’s gun-control-mania state of California. If people thought they were safer living under 100 new recent gun laws, wouldn’t they have stayed—with another couple hundred thousand flowing into the state?
There obviously are other reasons people move, such as high taxes, regulations, and housing prices. But states with low taxes, regulations, and property prices tend also to be the ones with stronger gun rights; and vice versa.
Is Newsom paying attention? Nearly a million people left California while he has been governor, and huge number of those people moved to constitutional carry states.
Is that just coincidence? Absolutely not.
Gun control is not only devastating California’s economy (that’s a huge number of workers and dollars to spend that left California under Newsom), but it could tank Newsom’s Presidential hopes in the future.
And that latter bit may be the only good thing to ever come from gun control.