California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest scheme—a federal “billionaire tax” funneled into a government-run “public equity” fund for AI—sounds like another progressive power grab dressed up as innovation policy. By targeting successful entrepreneurs and redirecting their capital into state-controlled tech ventures, Newsom is essentially proposing that Washington pick winners and losers in the most transformative industry of our time. The 2A community should recognize the pattern immediately: the same political class that wants to confiscate wealth from the productive also wants to decide which technologies are “safe” for civilians to own, and the same logic that justifies soaking billionaires will eventually be used to justify soaking gun owners with punitive excise taxes, registration fees, and insurance mandates.

What makes this proposal especially dangerous is the precedent it sets for federal control over emerging technologies. If the government can seize equity stakes in AI companies under the banner of “public good,” it can just as easily assert regulatory dominion over 3D-printed firearms, smart-gun mandates, or any future defensive technology that threatens the state’s monopoly on force. Newsom’s California record already shows the endgame—assault-weapon bans, magazine restrictions, and red-flag laws sold as “public safety” while quietly disarming law-abiding citizens. Extending that mindset to AI and billionaires is simply the next front in the long war on individual sovereignty.

For Second Amendment supporters, the takeaway is clear: every expansion of federal taxing and spending authority eventually circles back to firearms. Whether it’s funding “AI equity” or bankrolling more gun-control NGOs, the money has to come from somewhere, and the political class has made it obvious they prefer to extract it from the same productive Americans who also happen to be the most reliable defenders of the right to keep and bear arms.