Armed Self Defense
Condemning yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that prevents states from breaching the right to bear arms, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) claims that “this country is truly broken” if “Justice Alito really thinks people need guns to go to the grocery store ‘for self-defense.’”
IN FACT, Newsom has around-the-clock armed security even when he is shopping at Target, and thousands of people have been murdered in such places. Here are the specifics:
- As explained in the Court’s 6–3 ruling, “For years, the State of Hawaii made it almost impossible to obtain a license to carry a firearm” until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the Constitution’s Second and Fourteenth Amendments “protect the right to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense.”
- In response to that decision, Hawaii replaced its effective ban on carry permits “with new laws that achieved a similar result” by outlawing guns “on a large portion of the land within the State’s boundaries” and in “many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats” unless the “owner, lessee, operator, or manager of the property” gives “express authorization” to carry a firearm in the form of “clear and conspicuous signage” or “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.”
- Thus, the Supreme Court has now held that “Hawaii’s law “violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms” because it imposes “severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit.”
- An analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at about 1/10th the rate of police, and police commit crimes at roughly 1/37 the rate of the general public.
- Since 1999, an average of about 18,000 murders per year were committed in the United States, and roughly 5% of them took place in a “commercial or retail area” and another 5% in a “parking lot, public garage, or public transport,” amounting to about 47,000 such murders.
- As the governor of California, Newsom receives around-the-clock “Dignitary Protection” from the California Highway Patrol.
- In 2024, Newsom was shopping with his security detail at a Target store, which became a public incident because he witnessed a shoplifting that the clerk blamed on “the governor” and his soft-on-crime policies.
- A 2013 study ordered by President Obama and conducted by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million.”
- No Democrat-appointed Supreme Court Justice has ever ruled that the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is actually a right of the people.
- Instead, they argued that it only applies to individuals enlisted in a “well-regulated militia,” which they claim are the state National Guard units.
- Dictionaries from the era in which the Second Amendment was written use the term “well-regulated” as a synonym for “orderly” and “methodical,” including examples like “well regulated time-pieces,” “well-regulated standing army,” “well regulated sober spirit,” “well-regulated diet,” and “well regulated family.”
- An encyclopedia and a dictionary from the era in which the Second Amendment was written document that “militia” includes all citizens “who arm themselves, upon a short warning, for their own defense.”
- In all other places where the Constitution uses the phrase “right of the people,” there is universal agreement that these rights apply to the people, not just government employees.
- James Madison, the primary author of the 2nd Amendment, wrote that “being armed” is an “advantage” that “Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
- Jacob Howard, the U.S. senator who introduced the 14th Amendment, stated that its primary purpose is to “restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect” the “personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution,” including “the right to keep and to bear arms.”
