West Coast, Messed Coast™: The Left's Unconstitutional Assault on Guns

Greetings West Coast, Messed Coast™ readers! This week your humble West Coast, Messed Coast™ correspondent takes on the state of play in the Left’s ongoing jihad against law-abiding gun owners.

The confused left

As you are well aware, this is among the most confused and Leftist areas of the country. Confused because Washington, Oregon, and California have made themselves sanctuaries for all manner of lawbreakers by letting criminals out of jails and prisons, reducing penalties for felonies, and even redefining felonies down to misdemeanors in the name of equity. You are not allowed to smoke tobacco on Seattle’s bus system, for example, but Fentanyl smokers can fire up without fear. Leftists defund the cops and then make it harder for citizens to protect themselves.

When the crime rates predictably go up, these same Leftists blame legal gun owners. As one West Coast, Messed Coast™ reader wrote me, “How come they call it cartel violence when it’s south of the border, but it’s gun violence here?” Better PR.

Illegal aliens, drug-addicted-tent-dwellers, abortion seekers, and underaged children who are secretly brought to their states for trans surgeries and puberty blockers, all have the protection of government… unlike legal gun owners.

Come to the West Coast, Messed Coast™, and live your best drug-addicted life while smoking your rent while living in a tent.

Open defiance

Now, Leftist lawmakers, perhaps upset over the Supreme Court decision aborting the Roe and Casey decisions, are actively defying the Bruen decision affirming citizens’ rights to keep and bear arms, an explicit right found in the U.S. Constitution.

I reported at the time that Justice Clarence Thomas clarified that the Second Amendment is not a “second-class right.”

Thomas stated unequivocally that Americans’ right to carry a gun outside the home has been treated as a second-class right in modern times. Indeed, the whims of politicians have been treated with more respect than bedrock constitutional principles surrounding Americans’ right to defend themselves with guns.

Thomas wrote, “we know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”

Thomas’s decision, however, didn’t touch on the “issues of licensing, background checks, training requirements, or limiting who may have a gun permit in the case of felons and the mentally incapable,” I wrote at the time.

Oregon

In 2022, Oregon anti-gun activists narrowly pushed through an initiative measure to require a permit to purchase a gun, require law enforcement training at facilities that don’t exist, in addition to other hoops to qualify a person to exercise an enumerated Constitutional right imbued by God.

The clearly unconstitutional measure is held in abeyance by a judge, but it should never have gotten that far. The Left, however, means to bleed the pro-gun groups dry by forcing them to spend millions to fight these clearly unconstitutional issues in court. If ever there was a time for loser-pays laws, this is it.

The Oregon Firearms Federation is fundraising to pay for lawyers.

But the Everytown, “Moms Demand Action” filled with radical pearl-wearing Leftists, and other Bloomberg paid-for groups are back with more gun-grabbing ideas. Oregon Catalyst lists the ideas kicking around this session of the legislature are:

– HB 2005: Banning the sale of self-made firearms
– HB 2006: Raising the age of rifles from 18 to 21
– HB 2007: Allow local governments to ban concealed carry on public property and nearby to property.
– HB 3060: Oregon income tax credit to buy gun safe/lock
– $750,000 to hire more prosecutors to focus just on gun crimes

Unconstitutional? No problem!

In Washington State, House Democrats passed two gun-grabbing measures that now go to the Senate. Among them, HB 1143, requires official training that doesn’t exist, including a reeducation speech from a person “with lived experience” to explain problems with gun ownership and how they were hurt by guns.

In addition, HB 1240 makes illegal the manufacture or import of a swath of scary-looking guns such as AR and AK rifle platforms that are “in common use.” They also seek to outlaw “semi-automatic firearms with multiple accessories that are now common, including telescoping stocks, threaded barrels for muzzle brakes, flash suppressors or silencers, and pistol grips. Magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition would also be banned.” Emphasis added.

Of course, as federal statistics confirm, bans on so-called “assault weapons” throughout the country in 1994 made little to no difference in crime rates. Statistician and economist John Lott testified in 2019 before the Pennsylvania lawmakers that “even researchers funded by the Clinton administration, which enacted the 1994 federal ban were unable to find evidence that such a ban reduced any type of violence …There’s also no evidence that crime rates were affected by the 1994 federal ban on magazines that hold more than 10 bullets.”

And that’s because the vast law-abiding owners of scary-looking guns don’t do carjackings, bank robberies, and street crime.

Nevertheless, Democrats said the semi-automatic rifle ban did have a profound impact on mass shootings because they say so. Furthermore, “this regulation is likely to have an impact on the number of mass shootings committed in Washington,” though the last school shooting was conducted with a handgun.

During the debate, one Republican lawmaker said that, as a woman with a stalker, her stalker would serve less time than someone breaking the proposed gun law. “That’s insane,” she told the speaker of the House.

Tellingly, amendments sought by Republicans to determine if the proposed laws were legal under the state and U.S. constitutions both failed on party-line votes.

Insane? Why should that stop Democrats?

California

California’s ban on scary-looking guns could go down in the courts, a reality ignored by the Left’s fellow travelers in the northern West Coast, Messed Coast™ states who want to replicate the farce.

The Second Amendment Foundation reports in GunMag that the worst of the West Coast, Messed Coast™ gun bans soon may go down in flames and soon.

It’s all up to U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, whose track record on Second Amendment cases has been pretty good for gun rights groups. In the case of Miller v. Bonta, several gun rights organizations and four private citizens are challenging the ban, which may no longer be permitted under new guidelines set down by the U.S. Supreme Court in last year’s Bruen ruling.

California’s law prohibits people from owning, selling, or transferring “assault weapons” and limits magazines to ten rounds. At least Washington’s proposed law allows these subjects to keep their weapons. Small consolation.

The Leftists are winning the hearts and minds of their own party, according to a new IGS poll by UC Berkeley. The poll shows that 86% of Democrats hold gun control in higher esteem than the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Republicans are nearly inverse, with 82% supporting the Second Amendment over gun control.

It’s really not about criminals and crime and the children for these Leftists. They’re fine with killing children in the womb, they make us tolerate violent crime in the name of equity, and they don’t want us to defend ourselves.

Imagine what could happen if they put this much effort into going after actual criminals instead of creating new ones?