CA Politicians Remove Penalties for Criminals Using Guns

With the unprecedented surge in shootings and homicides in California over the past two years, you would think that even the state’s woke, progressive political class would take action to crack down on criminal firearm use.  Nope.

Michele Hanisee, veteran prosecutor and President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles has this piece explaining how  progressive LA Country District Attorney George Gascón and the politicians in Sacramento want to decriminalize the use of firearms by criminals at the same time the “LA County Sheriff has reported a stunning 111 percent increase in homicides from January 1, 2021, to May 21, 2021.”  Most of the murder victims were shot.  Hanisee notes that policies reducing penalties for crimes enacted in Sacramento and ordered by Gascón, not the increase in legal firearm sales that liberal politicians decry, is causing the skyrocketing increase in shootings and homicides in California.

She cites a recent study out of U.C. Davis, no bastion of conservative thought, which found “no causation between increased gun sales and the rise in violent crime.”  The study looked at firearm sales from 2018 through 2020, concluding that “despite concomitant increases in firearm purchasing and firearm violence nationally, the magnitude of the increase in purchasing at the state-level did not explain the magnitude of the increase in non-domestic firearm violence.”

In the face of this, Gascón refuses to allow the prosecutors in his office to add the increased sentence for criminal firearm use provided by state law, while the legislature is currently working to repeal that law and Governor Newsom has signed a new law allowing judges to dismiss firearm sentence increases.

How long will it take for the public to realize that politicians who blame guns for violent crime are trying to distract us from the laws they have passed which remove the consequences for criminal behavior fueling the national epidemic of violence?