NY Post Op-Ed Calls Out California’s Latest Gun Control Measures

June 24, 2026
12:20 am

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California’s newest round of gun-control proposals—everything from expanded “assault-weapon” definitions to fresh magazine restrictions—has drawn fresh fire from the New York Post, and the paper’s op-ed lands like a warning flare for the rest of the country. Rather than treating the Golden State as an outlier, the piece correctly frames Sacramento’s moves as a deliberate test kitchen for national policy, betting that if restrictions can be normalized on one coast they’ll migrate inland under the banner of “public safety.” What the op-ed only hints at, however, is how these layered rules function less as crime-fighting tools and more as litigation tripwires: each new definition invites fresh lawsuits, each registration requirement creates a searchable database, and each compliance cost prices out the working-class gun owner who can’t afford yet another lawyer or gunsmith retrofit. For the 2A community the real takeaway isn’t the incremental nature of the rules but their cumulative effect on the right to keep and bear arms outside the home. California already boasts the nation’s most byzantine permitting scheme; stacking additional cosmetic-feature bans and micro-stamping mandates on top simply raises the cost of lawful carry until it becomes, in practice, a de-facto prohibition for anyone who isn’t wealthy or connected. That’s the quiet genius of the strategy—lawmakers rarely have to utter the word “ban” when they can achieve the same result through a thicket of fees, delays, and design restrictions that no manufacturer will bother to meet. The op-ed’s larger service is to remind readers that these experiments don’t stay in California. Once a Ninth Circuit panel blesses a new definition or registration scheme, copy-cat bills surface in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey within a single legislative cycle. The 2A grassroots response has to shift from playing defense on each bill to going on offense in the courts and the culture, hammering the point that “common-sense” is often just a euphemism for “common access denied.” If the Post is right—and the polling suggests it is—voters outside California are finally noticing that the state’s “laboratory of democracy” keeps producing the same failed results: skyrocketing street crime paired with ever-tightening rules on the people who aren’t committing it.

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For the 2A community the real takeaway isn’t the incremental nature of the rules but their cumulative effect on the right to keep and bear arms outside the home. California already boasts the nation’s most byzantine permitting scheme; stacking additional cosmetic-feature bans and micro-stamping mandates on top simply raises the cost of lawful carry until it becomes, in practice, a de-facto prohibition for anyone who isn’t wealthy or connected. That’s the quiet genius of the strategy—lawmakers rarely have to utter the word “ban” when they can achieve the same result through a thicket of fees, delays, and design restrictions that no manufacturer will bother to meet.

The op-ed’s larger service is to remind readers that these experiments don’t stay in California. Once a Ninth Circuit panel blesses a new definition or registration scheme, copy-cat bills surface in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey within a single legislative cycle. The 2A grassroots response has to shift from playing defense on each bill to going on offense in the courts and the culture, hammering the point that “common-sense” is often just a euphemism for “common access denied.” If the Post is right—and the polling suggests it is—voters outside California are finally noticing that the state’s “laboratory of democracy” keeps producing the same failed results: skyrocketing street crime paired with ever-tightening rules on the people who aren’t committing it.

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