Former Assemblyman and current congressional candidate Tim Donnelly believes Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s gun control ballot initiative will serve to drive GOP voters to the voting booth, thereby providing a boon for GOP candidates.
Donnelly explained his theory by pointing to the 1982 gubernatorial election, an election in which “a strong turnout of voters opposed to a gun-control measure … helped Republican George Deukmejian defeat Democrat Tom Bradley.”
According to The Sacramento Bee, Donnelly believes the gains possible for the GOP are so great that Newsom’s gun-control-via-ballot-initiative approach will end up as “a warning to the left.”
Newsom is seeking to outlaw all ammunition magazines in California that exceed the ten-round limit Elliot Rodger used in his May 2014 Santa Barbara attack. Moreover, Newsom’s initiative also seeks to implement background checks for all law-abiding ammunition purchasers.
Donnelly said he believes Californians are waking up to the fact that safety-though-government-controls is an empty promise. The Santa Barbara attack and more recent San Bernardino attacks occurred in spite of myriad gun controls, not for lack of them.
Donnelly said:
I am not going to call it anti-gun legislation. What it is is anti-freedom legislation because, essentially, people have figured out that the government can’t and won’t protect us. So the only way we could do that is protect ourselves. That means we have to have the ability to keep and bear arms.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.