In recent weeks, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has turned 180 degrees on things like limiting police power and dealing with homeless encampments. This might seem like either a move to common sense or election-year desperation as he tries to appeal to voters outside of his state. Perhaps he got passed up for the VP slot due to the disorder in his state, and he’s hoping for a 2028 run for the big chair. But, my take on this is that it’s just a natural consequence of California’s anti-gun policies and culture and the total mindset of people who think that way.
Before anyone points out the absurdity of this simple argument, I’m not saying that all countries without guns in the hands of citizens end up like California with rampant crime, homelessness and people being one of the top exports. There are plenty of very stable countries that have strict gun control laws and also have law and order.
But, places that anti-gun people point to as great examples of gun control working out aren’t California. None of those places have the problems California has. They don’t have the housing shortages pushing people into the street. They don’t have the economic desperation at the bottom that drives people to turn to crime and go back to it after getting out of prison. They don’t have social decohesion that leads to disconnectedness, desperation and rampant drug addiction.
None of those problems are easy to solve, and most of them can’t be solved by government. If anything, government did dumb things to create crippling housing shortages, lost economic opportunity and create an environment for kids who weren’t raised to be good people. The only way a population in that bad of shape can keep itself safe is through personal freedom, which includes being able to defend yourself from the dregs of society.
When California decided to go after good people while taking it easy on the criminals and addicts they felt bad for without any real problem solving for that crowd, the result was inevitable. Unlike say Norway, California didn’t address poverty and other social problems while taking away people’s guns, turning good citizens into criminals and holding true criminals unaccountable. Then, they were shocked to see that they didn’t get the same result that those kinds of countries got.
If anything, the appearance of homemade gun designs like the FGC-9 in those countries, minus the mass shootings, shows us that a stable society is what keeps the violence down, not gun control. So, California and other such states copied the wrong things from those countries and are now left wondering why it doesn’t work out.
The Misguided Return To “Law & Order”
With intractable social problems and gun control failing to fix everything, California is left with just one other solution: clamping down harder.
Political scientist Ian Bremmer explains the conundrum as a “J Curve”. When a society is open (as in free), it can flourish. But, really restricted societies can also have a lot of stability, even if they can’t be as stable or prosperous as open societies that respect their citizens and serve them instead of treating them like subjects. But, at the bottom of this curve are societies that aren’t open enough to be prosperous and are closed enough to be artificially stable. These countries tend to suffer continuous political violence until they either open up or close down (or self-destruct entirely).
With California heading toward the bottom of that curve while having leaders who don’t value a really open society, the only other option left to them is to clamp down hard to try to restore order.
But, they aren’t at the bottom yet and might not survive the trip across and up the other side of the curve into such a police state, as there are very valid reasons that police have had their hands tied in California. For example police chases have mostly become a thing of the past in all 50 states because people realized that police chases are more dangerous than the bad guy getting away in many cases. So, chases have been restricted to only those situations that are more dangerous to the public than the chase itself (a wise policy that keeps the police and reckless criminals from harming more innocent people).
No more excuses. https://t.co/QyiehmqhkJ
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) July 26, 2024
Instead of fixing underlying problems and trying to address crime with openness, he’s trying to take California law enforcement back to the days when Los Angeles police chases were the highlight of any cable news day. He’s also looking to do the same thing with homelessness:
No more excuses.
We’ve provided the time.
We’ve provided the funds.
Now it’s time for locals to do their job. https://t.co/oMQiWggJBa
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) July 25, 2024
Instead of solving the housing crisis with open systems and letting the free market provide the housing supply people need, Newsom is instead trying to clamp down on the homeless population in his state and force them into something akin to Star Trek’s “Sanctuary Districts” (something Deep Space 9 writers set in 2024 California, interestingly enough). Instead, California’s endless supply of HOA Karens and draconian zoning leads to a closed system that can only close down further.
None of this is going to work, though. Like when California copied half of what European countries did, California’s only copying half of the red state law and order playbook. Without property rights, open government and people free to defend themselves, that’s going to fail spectacularly and lead to further crackdowns on personal freedoms or at the very least, the utter collapse of California.
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