Yes, Supreme Court gun ruling means more Californians will be able to pack in public

The same Supreme Court that appears ready to return abortion law to the states ruled Thursday that the state of New York cannot decide which of its residents may carry guns in public.

Like the New York law struck down by the 6-3 ruling, a California law also requires those who want to carry concealed weapons to convince local officials that they have a compelling reason to do so. Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws. And yes, this outrageous expansion of gun rights at a time of record firearm violence and mass shootings may well mean that more Californians will be able to pack in public, too.

That would mean more shootouts like the one on K Street that killed six and wounded a dozen more in downtown Sacramento in April.

In a dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer listed other recent mass shootings, including the one in which 10 Black people were killed in a Buffalo supermarket. The man charged in that shooting has said he was trying to keep Black people from replacing and “eliminating the white race.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pretended not to understand what possible bearing all the blood in the streets — and in the churches and the schools — might have on the right to bear arms.

“Why … does the (Breyer) dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years?” Alito wrote. “Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home? And how does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.”

By this logic, no law that can be broken deters any wrongdoing — in which case we should scrap all the laws, and you, Justices, should take the rest of the term off.

Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately announced legislation that he and others hope will blunt the potential damage done by this ruling. Meanwhile, Sacramento County’s thankfully soon-to-be-former Sheriff Scott Jones insisted that the ruling wouldn’t change anything locally because he was already handing out permits so freely. When he took office a dozen years ago, there were roughly 350 permit holders in the county. Since then, he said, his office has issued some 12,000.

But why does the high court apparently want to make it easier for states to restrict abortion rights and harder to restrict gun rights? Because the majority is not so much pro-life as it is pro-fetal-life. Because it’s not so much pro-states’ rights as it is pro-red states’ rights.

And because, as Gov. Gavin Newsom said in response to Thursday’s radical ruling, it’s “a court hell-bent on pushing a radical ideological agenda and infringing on the rights of states to protect our citizens from being gunned down in our streets, schools and churches.”