California Politician Gavin Newsom on Guns and Pot

I was watching the Bravo TV show “Watch What Happens Live” recently and was interested to see former San Francisco Mayor, current California Lieutenant Governor, and California Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom on as a guest. The guests are typically actors, entertainers, and reality TV stars, so it was not clear what Newsom was on to promote other than himself.

That Newsom is anti-gun is not news. He has recently led the effort to get 800,000 signatures for an anti-gun ballot initiative in California, and he was Mayor of the city that recently puts its last gun store out of business.

What interested me was a couple of moments in the show that were very revealing. A multi-millionaire son-in-law to someone who is even richer, Newsom declined to comment when WWHL host Andy Cohen asked about his security detail. I wonder whether they carry guns, though, because guns do not make you safer according to Newsom and his political allies. Actually, I don’t wonder – I am pretty darn sure they do.

The second interesting comment had to do with the effort to bring a ballot initiative in California to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Newsom indicated that this should be on the ballot in California in the next couple of years and he is the only Democrat in statewide office who has publicly supported it. Certainly the legalization of pot in California could become to marijuana liberalization what Florida passing concealed carry was to the liberalization of firearms laws.

The conjunction of Newsom’s anti-gun and pro-pot ballot initiatives really struck home for me because of the recent “execution-style” murders of 8 members of a single family in four locations in rural Ohio. CNN called the murders “Heartless. Well-planned. Mysterious. And terrifying.”

The murders were indeed mysterious to me at first, like so many senseless murders are. But then I heard the news that marijuana growing operations were found at 3 of the 4 crime scenes. At that point, what happened made as much sense as an episode of “Justified.” The drug business is risky business.

What does all of this have to do with Newsom? Well, I began to ask myself, which public policy would have made the Ohio murders less likely? Newsom’s anti-gun initiative? Or Newsom’s pro-marijuana legalization initiative. I think the former would probably not have prevented the crime. But the latter might have.

Anyone else with me on this?

Interesting not highly relevant side note: Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, graduating in 1989. I was accepted to Santa Clara University and planned to play baseball there beginning in the 1986-87 academic year, but chose to go to school elsewhere. We could have been teammates! Oh, fate!

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