On April 24, 2024, the Orange County Register’s editorial board mocked Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) failed push for a gun control amendment to the United States Constitution.
Breitbart News reported that on June 8, 2023, Newsom proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution which he hoped could be secured and used to restrict gun ownership.
The Associated Press reported that Newsom’s amendment, which would be the twenty-eighth amendment, would ban firearms which Democrats label “assault weapons,” require a minimum age of 21 to purchase firearms, implement universal background checks, and mandate a waiting period for gun purchases.
Newsom’s office released a statement on the proposed gun controls which did not contain a specific time frame for the gun purchase waiting period. Rather, it simply claimed the period should be “reasonable.”
On August 16, 2023, Breitbart News noted that California Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D) and Sen. Aisha Wahab (D) put forward a joint resolution calling for the convocation of a constitutional convention to adopt Newsom’s amendment.
The resolution put forward by Jones-Sawyer and Wahab called for a convention and only needed two-thirds of the other states to do the same.
On Wednesday the Orange County Register’s editorial board pointed out that the California Democrats are still waiting for so much as even one other state to join their convention push.
The board pointed to a report from the Bay Area News Group’s John Woolfolk, who observed that Democrats control the legislatures of 18 states in addition to California, yet none of them have joined the gun control convention push.
They intimated that Newsom’s amendment never really had a chance from the start. “It was all a bit much for what everyone understood at the time to be Newsom’s latest attempt at positioning himself for the White House.”
The board noted that when Newsom introduced the amendment, Constitutional attorney Cody J. Wisniewski explained why he believed it would be a dud:
Given only 10 states and Washington D.C. have any form of ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’ or any form of waiting period, while 27 states have enacted some iteration of free/constitutional/permitless carry, it is clear that there isn’t currently much appetite for Newsom’s particular brand of gun control across the country.
It should be noted that since June 2023–the time at which Wisniewski critiqued Newsom’s gun control amendment–two more states have adopted constitutional carry, bringing the total number of permitless carry states to 29. The additional two are Louisiana and South Carolina.