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Gavin Newsom Says the Second Amendment ‘Is Becoming a Suicide Pact’ After Another Mass Shooting

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted the country’s failure to address gun violence on Monday, saying “the Second Amendment’s becoming a suicide pact.” Moments later he learned about yet another mass killing in his state, the third in eight days. 

California’s latest mass shooting happened on Monday afternoon, when seven people were shot dead by a 62-year-old man at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, 30 miles south of San Francisco.

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Newsom’s comments, in which he called for the banning of high capacity magazines, came hours after a 72-year-old gunman wielding a customized rifle with a high capacity magazine killed 11 people in a dance studio in Monterey Park. Days earlier, on Jan. 16, a teenage mother and her baby were among six people killed in a shooting at a home in California’s Central Valley.

Newsom tweeted on Monday that he was in the hospital visiting victims of the Monterey Park shooting when he was told about the Half Moon Bay incident. 

“At the hospital meeting with victims of a mass shooting when I get pulled away to be briefed about another shooting. This time in Half Moon Bay,” Newsom tweeted. “Tragedy upon tragedy.”

Speaking to CBS on Monday, in an interview broadcast after the Half Moon Bay shooting took place, Newsom addressed the spate of mass shootings in the U.S. in the first month of 2023 and lamented that nothing is being done to advance gun control laws.

“Nothing about this is surprising. Everything about this is infuriating,” he said. “The Second Amendment is becoming a suicide pact.” 

When CBS’ host Norah O’Donnell pushed back, saying there were a lot of legal gun owners in the U.S., Newsom responded:  “I have no ideological opposition to someone who is reasonably and responsibly owning firearms and getting background checks and being trained.”

Earlier in the day, Newsom attacked TV networks that “sell fear” about crime and immigration, singling out Fox News for the station’s typical response to mass shootings. 

“Fox is a disgrace what they say, what these people say every single night,” Newsom said. “There’s xenophobia, they’re racial priming, what they have done to perpetuate crime and violence in this country, by scapegoating, and by doing not a damn thing about gun safety, not a damn thing for decades.”

Newsom then outlined how the network’s hosts have spent more than a decade normalizing mass killings by resisting calls for stricter gun control laws.

“It’s ‘not the right time, not the right time, not the right time.’ Rinse, repeat. Not the right time, Sandy Hook, not the right time, rinse, repeat. Uvalde. Remember Uvalde? Remember? Rinse, repeat. You don’t remember the Borderline here, 13 people, look that one up. Rinse, repeat. Not a damn thing they do. And we know it. And we allow them to get away with that.”

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