The mass shooting in Sacramento last weekend that took six lives occurred one block from the Capitol offices of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The following morning, I speculated on social media that it was probably gang members with criminal records. It didn’t take a Kreskin to make that sort of prediction which, of course, turned out to be accurate.
Nor does it take extraordinary clairvoyance to predict that progressives would, once again, blame “gun violence” rather than criminally inclined perpetrators. (I’ve often wondered why, when there is a murder committed with a knife, progressives never talk about “knife violence.”) True to form, both Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sacramento’s mayor, Darrell Steinberg, immediately blamed “gun violence” and called for more gun control laws notwithstanding the fact that California already has some of the strictest gun control laws in America and is currently considering more.
The issue of gun control aside, the progressive answer to any one of California’s many problems is to advance “solutions” that are ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Here, their answer to civil unrest, increased crime and perceived excessive incarceration is to “defund” the police and grant early release to violent felons. Even when, as last week’s carnage reveals, these policies don’t work, the response is frequently doubling down with more of the same.