LA Mayor Race Heats Up – Karen Bass Suggests Opponent Is Lazy: ‘Nobody Can Work with Her’

August 20, 2026
6:42 pm

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In the latest round of Los Angeles’s mayoral slugfest, Karen Bass has decided that the best way to defend her record is to call her challenger, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, lazy and impossible to work with. It’s a classic political pivot: when the city’s crime numbers look bad, blame the other candidate’s personality instead of the policies that emptied jails, cut police budgets, and turned skid row into a humanitarian crisis. For Angelenos who still believe the Second Amendment isn’t a punch-line, the subtext is impossible to miss—Bass is doubling down on the same “root-causes” orthodoxy that treats lawful gun owners as the problem and career criminals as the victims of circumstance. Raman, for her part, has positioned herself as the even further-left alternative, which in Los Angeles means promising to slash what remains of the LAPD while simultaneously claiming she’ll restore public safety through “community investments.” That’s a policy circle that only closes if you ignore the data: California’s last decade of ever-tightening gun control has coincided with car-jackings, smash-and-grabs, and open-air drug markets that no amount of “violence interrupters” have managed to interrupt. The 2A community watches these races less for the personal insults than for the menu of new restrictions that will inevitably follow—expanded red-flag laws, ammunition serialization schemes, and the quiet continuation of discretionary concealed-carry permitting that keeps ordinary citizens disarmed in high-crime neighborhoods. The real takeaway isn’t whether Bass or Raman is lazier; it’s that both candidates view the right to keep and bear arms as an obstacle rather than a safeguard. Los Angeles voters who still want the means to defend themselves are left choosing between two brands of the same regulatory instinct, each one more comfortable expanding the administrative state than confronting the revolving-door criminal justice policies that actually drive violence. Until that consensus cracks, the campaign’s rhetorical fireworks will continue to mask a slow, steady squeeze on the Second Amendment in America’s second-largest city.

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Raman, for her part, has positioned herself as the even further-left alternative, which in Los Angeles means promising to slash what remains of the LAPD while simultaneously claiming she’ll restore public safety through “community investments.” That’s a policy circle that only closes if you ignore the data: California’s last decade of ever-tightening gun control has coincided with car-jackings, smash-and-grabs, and open-air drug markets that no amount of “violence interrupters” have managed to interrupt. The 2A community watches these races less for the personal insults than for the menu of new restrictions that will inevitably follow—expanded red-flag laws, ammunition serialization schemes, and the quiet continuation of discretionary concealed-carry permitting that keeps ordinary citizens disarmed in high-crime neighborhoods.

The real takeaway isn’t whether Bass or Raman is lazier; it’s that both candidates view the right to keep and bear arms as an obstacle rather than a safeguard. Los Angeles voters who still want the means to defend themselves are left choosing between two brands of the same regulatory instinct, each one more comfortable expanding the administrative state than confronting the revolving-door criminal justice policies that actually drive violence. Until that consensus cracks, the campaign’s rhetorical fireworks will continue to mask a slow, steady squeeze on the Second Amendment in America’s second-largest city.

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