Sorry, Gov. Newsom, but Citizens Want to Use Guns to Defend … – Heritage.org

Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled hisproposal for a 28th Amendmentto the U.S. Constitution, which the Democrat says would enshrine fundamental, broadly supported gun safety measures into law while leaving the Second Amendment unchanged.

Although the Second Amendment protects individual liberty by telling the government what it cant do with respect to gun control regulations, Newsoms proposed constitutional amendment would tell the government what it must do to restrict individual liberty through gun control.

The California governors proposal would ban civilian sales for semiautomatic firearmscommonly owned by millions of Americans, strip law-abiding young adults of their right to keep and bear arms, and (in the form of waiting periods and universal background checks) impose many layers of bureaucratic red tape between peaceable citizens and the exercise of their natural right to self-defense.

The notion that this idea would do anything other than gut the Second Amendment is, of course, laughable. And despite Newsoms insistence that these measures are popular, theyve been passed only by a small minority of states. His amendment has no chance whatsoever of being passed by a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress, much less of being ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures.

The reality is that more than 230 years after Congress ratified it, the Second Amendment continues toplay an integral rolein preserving Americans natural rights, particularly from criminals who would harm them.

Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between500,000 and 3 milliontimesannually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded thatroughly 1.6 million defensive gun usesoccur in the United States every year.

For this reason,The Daily Signalpublishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous months many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missedor that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accountsherefrom past months and years. You also may follow@DailyDGUon Twitter for daily highlights of recent defensive gun uses.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in June. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundations interactiveDefensive Gun Use Database.(The Daily Signal is Heritages multimedia news organization.)

As these examples help demonstrate, the Second Amendment doesnt need amending, and peaceable citizens dont need more barriers to the exercise of their natural right of self-defense.

They need a government that doesnt resort to Orwellian doublespeak about its goals, pretending to enshrine freedom by restricting those rights that already are enumerated in our Constitution.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

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Sorry, Gov. Newsom, but Citizens Want to Use Guns to Defend ... - Heritage.org