Gavin Newsom, gun grabber

California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, is making quite a name for himself, setting out, with neither laws nor the Second Amendment, to grab guns. Here's what the Los Angeles Times is reporting:

In his state budget plan released days after he took the oath of office, Newsom proposed adding $5.6 million — about 50% more than in Brown’s budget this year — to seize guns from thousands more people who are ineligible to possess firearms because of criminal convictions or mental illness. The governor is also asking lawmakers to beef up a California Department of Justice unit responsible for enforcing laws on gun sales. And his budget proposes more money for the Firearms Violence Research Center at UC Davis. So, what he's doing is enforcing the law to the letter, with big expenditures (he's always got money for big expenditures) on an expansion of the bureaucracy to ensure that every 'i' is dotted and every 't' is crossed. Someone who bought a gun legally one year, and got convicted of a crime five years later but who still had that gun in the cabinet, is priority one, even if the gun wasn't the problem. Well. Far be it for me to oppose the full enforcement of the law as it is written. But what leaps out from this is his double standard for hypocrisy. While he's going for full complete enforcement on gun laws, he's letting voter registration slide into an amazing morass of illegal voting and false registration with no urgency to fix that, given the benefits it may give to his fellow Democrats in the ballot harvesting business. He's also amazingly lax about enforcing immigration laws, looking into new ways to allow foreigners to harvest California's resources over following the letter to the law on that issue. In his case, that means not cooperating with federal immigration authorities on deportation cases, particularly with criminal illegals, and maintaining California as a "sanctuary state" as well as working big on full "free" health care, financed by U.S. citizens, for people who don't observe immigration laws. Funny how rule of law can be so selective. The laws Newsom is all in for are those laws that benefit his political agenda. All the other laws, well, they're unimportant because they have no political uses for him. Somehow, that's not how rule of law was originally intended to work. Image credit: J.D. Lasica, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0