California governor Gavin Newsom signed a gun bill Friday explicitly modeled after Texas’s abortion law, allowing private individuals to sue those making or selling guns illegally.
The California bill is a direct response to Texas’s pro-life Heartbeat Act, which was signed into law in May of 2021. The Texas measure allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or those helping a woman get an abortion after roughly six weeks, when the heartbeat can be detected, for a minimum of $10,000. The Texas law, passed before Roe v. Wade was overturned, skirted the courts’ ability to declare it unconstitutional because no government is involved in enforcing it.
Newsom called on the California legislature to pass a gun bill modeled on the Heartbeat Act after the Supreme Court declined to block the abortion law.
The law, authored by California state senator Bob Hertzberg, allows Californians to sue those “making, selling, transporting or distributing illegal assault weapons and ghost guns.” The $10,000 damage minimum also applies to gun dealers who illegally sell to people under 21 years of age.
“Our message to the criminals spreading illegal weapons in California is simple: you have no safe harbor here in the Golden State. While the Supreme Court rolls back reasonable gun safety measures, California continues adding new ways to protect the lives of our kids,” Newsom said in response to the bill.
“California will use every tool at its disposal to save lives, especially in the face of an increasingly extreme Supreme Court,” the Democratic governor added, speaking at Santa Monica College, where a gunman killed three people in 2013 after killing his father and brother at home, using a rifle he had assembled himself.
Newsom has been a vocal advocate for both gun regulation and abortion, pledging to make California an abortion “sanctuary” for out-of-state women.
He signed an executive order in June prohibiting other states and out-of-state individuals from seeking medical information on women having abortions in the state.
Thirteen abortion bills sponsored by Planned Parenthood are still sitting in the California Senate, one of which would provide funding for out-of-state women’s lodging and transportation to get an abortion in California.
Californians will also vote in November on amending the state constitution to include the right to abortion after the Democrat-led state legislature approved a measure to put the amendment on the ballot.