LOS ANGELES (AP) — A new California law that bans people from carrying firearms in most public places was once again blocked from taking effect Saturday as a court case challenging it continues.
A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel dissolved a temporary hold on a lower court injunction blocking the law. The hold was issued by a different 9th Circuit panel and had allowed the law to go into effect Jan. 1.
Saturday’s decision keeps in place a Dec. 20 ruling by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney blocking the law. Carney said that it violates the Second Amendment and that gun rights groups would likely prevail in proving it unconstitutional.
The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits people from carrying concealed guns in 26 types of places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban applies regardless of whether a person has a concealed carry permit.
The real things that need to be done are fixing underlying, structural problems, and it would likely take about 2-3 generations to largely fix. There are a lot of problems that contribute the rate of violence, so fixing any one thing, by itself, isn’t going to have an enormous effect. And there are groups of people that are actively trying to accelerate the problems, because they believe that there are certain moral or religious arguments at stake, rather than utilitarian ones.
Lots and lots of violence could be reduced by reducing poverty; not many people get involved in crime when they have other good options. But hey, that’s socialism. Dems say they want to do things like that, but Dems generally have a problem with doing what they claim they want to do because there are a lot of NIMBY Dems–e.g., it’s a nat’l platform that people should have access to affordable housing, but if you try to re-zone for affordable housing in a wealthy Democratic supermajority area, you’ll quickly find out that they want affordable housing somewhere else–and Dems that want social change only if it doesn’t mean they have to change. (IIRC, there was a certain communist author that pointed out that many of the communists in their area were petty bourgeoisie that believed they would have more after a revolution, rather than being proletariat that just wanted decent wages.)
That said, despite public perceptions, violent crimes are down for 2023. IIRC, homicide rates are also down by several percentage points.