California is moving ahead with legislation to allow ordinary citizens to sue gun makers modeled after Texas’ restrictive abortion law.
The bill, sponsored by State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, would allow individuals to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, transports, imports into the state or sells assault weapons, .50 BMG rifles, ghost guns, or ghost gun kits.
“If Texas can use a law to ban a woman’s right to choose and put her health at risk, we will use that same law to save lives and improve the health and safety of the people in the state of California,” Newsom said at a press conference on Friday, according to Politico.
“There is no principled way the U.S. Supreme Court can’t uphold this law,” Newsom added. “It is quite literally modeled after the law they just upheld in Texas.”
After the Supreme Court upheld the Texas law in December, Newsom vowed to introduced a similar measure in California, but for guns.
“I am outraged by yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place, and largely endorsing Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from the fundamental protections of Roe v. Wade. But if states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way,” Newsom said at the time.
