— “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

It has taken an unprecedented series of multiyear droughts, conversion of thousands of California lawns to water-sparing cacti and other plants and stricter-than-ever water rationing in many parts of the state, but at last it’s beginning to look like Coleridge’s mariner may have been premature.

There’s plenty of Pacific Ocean water being drunk in California today, with every indication suggesting there will be much more to come. California will likely never be like Israel, drawing 90% of its drinking water from desalinated sea water, but it’s probable now that eventually such purified brine will make up something more than 10% of the state’s supply.

This looks like a simple necessity. As the state insists on more and more dense residential construction and as snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada become thinner over the decades, this state will have to brace for spending big money to provide water for its population of about 40 million.

Yes, that population was down a little over the last two years, as some folks migrated to other states and fewer of the foreign-born came here during the worst COVID-19 pandemic years. But these look like minor and probably temporary phenomena compared with the full scope of urban California. No one has seen any notable declines in either traffic jams or crowds in pedestrian-only areas in spite of the state’s recent loss of one seat in Congress.

Plus the rest of California has seen that San Diego County, with the Poseidon Water desalination facility at Carlsbad producing all-out during the drought, was better off water-wise than many parts of the state. That came at a price, of course. The Poseidon plant, making about 48,000 acre-feet of purified water yearly (more than 1.5 billion gallons), accounted for almost 10% of San Diego County’s water at a price of about $2,750 per acre-foot.

At one time, the price tag seemed to make the cost of desalination prohibitive elsewhere in the state. At the time the Carlsbad plant was finished, supplies from the California State Water Project were being sold to some agencies for about $700 per acre-foot. Desalinated water thus cost about four times as much as aqueduct supplies.

However, the state’s aqueducts and the reservoirs they once filled have run at depleted levels for the last two years, and the cost differences of various types of water are beginning to narrow. Drought has caused the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the state’s largest water wholesaler, to sell treated supplies for about $1,200 per acre-foot over the last year, still not close to the cost of desalinated water, but much closer than it was only about six years ago.

As technology improves, allowing desalination to kill fewer marine animals and organisms while producing less brine, more plants will be approved. This will be especially true if droughts persist and provide political pressure to green-light desalination projects. New technology also includes experiments with widely-spaced desalination buoys to decentralize the process so no ocean areas are overloaded with either thick brine or dead flora and fauna.

As usual, necessity has become the mother of invention: To survive, California must have more desalination plants if drought and population levels persist. For sure, the political imperative is there: A July survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found three-quarters of likely voters believe droughts are a big problem. Expensive as it may be, that cannot help but thrust desalination to the fore as a big part of the solution.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

That’s done via land-use decisions that control how many housing units and commercial sites can be built in a given time. However, through a series of laws mandating new levels of density everywhere in the state, whether or not they are needed or justified, this key local power now belongs to largely anonymous state officials who know little or nothing about most places whose future they are deciding.

It’s being done through the elimination of single-family, or R-1, zoning. It’s being done via the new requirement that the state Housing and Community Development (HCD) Department approve housing elements for every locality. If HCD does not approve such a plan for a city, developers can target it with virtually no limits if they choose.

It’s all based on a supposed need for at least 1.8 million new housing units touted by HCD. This is despite the fact that the state auditor last spring found that HCD did not properly vet the documents and other instruments on which that estimate was based.

What’s more, only three years earlier, HCD was claiming more than 3.5 million new units were needed. Less than one-eighth of that figure have since risen, yet HCD has cut its need estimate considerably.

However, cities and counties must do what they’re told by this demonstrably incompetent agency or risk lawsuits and big losses in state grants for everything from sewers and road maintenance to police and fire departments. State Attorney General Rob Bonta even set up a new unit in his Justice Department to threaten and pursue noncompliant cities.

This leads localities to approve developments in ways they never did before, including some administrative approvals without so much as the possibility of a public hearing. It leads to the absurd, as with Atherton trying to get state approval of a plan forcing almost all local homeowners to create “additional dwelling units” on the one-acre lots long required in the city. That’s instead of building almost 400 townhouses or apartments in a town of barely 7,000 people.

And in Santa Monica, because the City Council didn’t get its housing element approved, developers can probably not be stopped as they make plans for at least 12 large new buildings. So much for bucolic seaside living.

Santa Monica is also an example of a city buckling to state pressure to allow huge projects opposed by most of its citizens, a majority of whom are renters. That city has done nothing to stop or alter the largest development in its history, to be built on a property at a major intersection now occupied by a grocery and several other stores.

Despite heavy community interest, evidenced by the more than 2,000 people on a Zoom call about the project last winter, the city will hold no public hearings and does not respond to most written communications from its citizens about the development. This is all because city officials fear the state will sue if it objects.

Several cities have begun to fight parts of today’s state domination of land use. Four Los Angeles County cities — Redondo Beach, Torrance, Carson and Whittier — are seeking a court order negating the 2021 Senate Bill 9, which lets single-family homes be replaced by as many as six units, with cities unable to nix any such project.

As city councils and county boards see their constituents objecting loudly to much of this, other lawsuits will inevitably follow. No one can predict whether or not courts will find that the state Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom have vastly overreached in their power grab, which is all for the sake of increased density and based on unfounded predictions by bureaucrats who answer to no one.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

The reason for this potential backfire resides most prominently here in California. This state is so large and leans so strongly Democratic that if legislators here reverse some longstanding state election policies, they could cause big changes nationally. This would be especially true if some potential California actions were imitated in other large-population blue states such as New York, Illinois, Oregon or Washington.

Here’s are the stakes in the Supreme Court case brought by North Carolina Republican legislators: State legislatures could be authorized to draw future legislative and congressional district boundaries any way they like, with no say for either governors or state courts. The North Carolina GOP sued because that state’s Supreme Court wouldn’t let them get away with patently partisan district maps guaranteed to perpetuate big Republican majorities in its legislature and congressional delegation.

If the Supreme Court, as some justices have indicated it might, awards such ultimately extreme powers to state legislatures, that may also let state lawmakers substitute presidential Electoral College members of their preference for those elected by voters. This would be a prescription for election irrelevance and would make voter suppression laws of the recent past look like mild, amateur tactics.

Essentially, it would let state legislatures and not the voters of any or all states make the most important civic decisions virtually unchecked. Except … California legislators would have it in their power to reverse much of what multiple other states might do. They could create a whole new kind of check and balance for the court and those other legislatures to consider.

In a way, California voters created today’s small Republican majority in the House of Representatives when they used ballot propositions to set up independent redistricting commissions for legislative and congressional districts here.

The House’s new GOP majority exists only because California elected 40 Democrats and 12 Republicans to the House in November using district lines drawn by the independent commission, which had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.

However, if the Supreme Court says legislatures — and not voters — have ultimate power over redistricting, state lawmakers here could overturn the independent commission’s district lines anytime they like. With Democrats holding majorities greater than two-thirds in both houses of this state’s Legislature, they could draw any lines they wished should the Supreme Court find for the North Carolina Republicans.

Does anyone seriously think a Democratic-drawn plan here would have enabled narrow victories for Republican representatives like John Duarte, Michelle Steel, Mike Garcia, David Valadao, Kevin Kiley or Young Kim, without whom there would be no House GOP majority? Does anyone seriously think a Democratic-drawn plan would have set up Orange County Democrat Katie Porter for several nail-biting post-election weeks?

There’s not a chance of that. Nor would there be any chance for Republicans, as they just did, to take away a formerly Democratic seat in Oregon and maintain all their seats in Washington state. The same holds true in Illinois and New York, the scene of a major Republican upset. So there is plenty of room for backfire if the Supreme Court goes extreme in granting state legislators almost unchecked power.

And what if the high court gave Republican-led legislatures in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania authority to substitute presidential electors different from those chosen by voters, and those legislatures then actually did that and reversed a national election outcome?

Does the Supreme Court seriously believe only extremist far-right activists are capable of reacting with an insurrection? If so, they’ve forgotten the almost anonymous leftists of Antifa, who in 2020 rioted and took over parts of Portland and Seattle.

So here’s a cautionary word to the conservative Supreme Court majority: If you open Pandora’s Box and sow the wind by changing America’s traditional political and electoral checks and balances, you could reap whatever whirlwind follows.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

So the new rules for rooftop solar energy that the commission proposed in November are very unusual: An almost completely reworked proposal that’s meant to keep rooftop energy expanding but also to bring more equity for electricity consumers unable to pay for rooftop solar or who are living in apartments, condominiums and other places where they can’t install it.

The originally proposed new rules, offered in late 2021, were intended to cut payments by 80% to solar rooftop owners for excess power their panels generate that’s then sent to the overall state power grid and thus increases the renewable electricity supply for everyone. They also would’ve charged rooftop solar owners a fee of about $60 a month for linking to the grid, which would have let them draw power when solar-linked storage batteries ran dry.

Since most solar rooftop owners pay more than $20,000 for panels and installation in order to avoid monthly electric bills, this plan promised to cut installations vastly. That would put about 67,000 installer and manufacturing jobs at risk, while slowing California’s march toward 100% renewable electricity.

Consumer groups and solar rooftop owners howled. Soon Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appoints CPUC members to staggered six-year terms but can’t fire them once they’re confirmed by the state Senate, joined the chorus. So in a virtually unprecedented move, the commissioners pulled back their plan from the brink of adoption, promising to create a revised proposal.

The new plan would still cut what solar owners are paid for excess energy but not by as much. This is their sop to advocates for utility customers unable to afford or install solar rooftops. The new rules would apply mostly to new solar rooftop owners.

Some advocates for nonrooftop electric customers have complained that they pay monthly to maintain the state’s grid while solar rooftop owners who link to that grid for emergency use don’t help with that cost. At the same time, the new plan eliminates the proposed $60 monthly fee.

So this is a compromise. It doesn’t make anyone very happy but was fair enough to avoid the kind of withering criticism that drew Newsom to oppose the previous proposal. The new plan’s exact reduction in what each solar rooftop owner can get for excess power will be based on the state’s “avoided cost” calculator, which figures how much solar rooftop owners save on electric bills each month.

Solar rooftop advocates like the Oakland-based Center for Biological Diversity concede that the new plan is an improvement but oppose the reductions in electricity prices paid to owners. The group says the avoided-cost calculator “ignores many benefits (of solar rooftops returned to the grid) … such as (improved) grid reliability, reduction in greenhouse gas and air pollution and local economic benefits, including job creation.”

That likely will not convince the commissioners, who appear bent on imposing their new plan in a meeting scheduled for Thursday.

Yet the new plan is the first sign in many years that the CPUC may occasionally listen to consumers rather than just utility companies. The commission has been widely criticized for more than 50 years for favoring companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric over their customers.

This time, with all three of those companies firmly behind the original version of the new rooftop solar rules because it would have mostly eliminated their payments to small solar rooftop owners, the CPUC has bent a bit to a specific group of consumers, the residential solar owners.

That still leaves the commission far short of looking after the interests of most utility customers, as the new responsiveness mainly benefits a group with above-average wealth. That makes the new solar metering plan an improvement but does not lessen big doubts about the CPUC’s responsiveness.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

One high average markup percentage belongs to the nonluxury Jeep Wrangler, generally priced about $8,500 above MSRP, closely followed by the Porsche Macan at $14,200 over MSRP. Both represent dealer markups of about 25%. In most cases, barring special sales that reduce the markup a bit, this means hugely higher dealer profits. This is pure price gouging, based on the age-old law of supply and demand.

“As demand continues to exceed supply for popular vehicles, dealers are adding market adjustments generally ranging from $2,000 (for low-end gasoline-powered models) to $10,000,” reports the automotive research firm iseecars.com, whose fall survey included 1.9 million new car listings. “Markups are highest for cars that hold their value best after they leave the dealerships.”

Translation: hybrids or electric vehicles. In Los Angeles, California’s biggest market, some of the highest markups belong to the Genesis GV70 luxury sport utility vehicle, generally priced slightly more than 25% over its MSRP. The same Genesis model also tops markups in San Diego, where dealers commonly ask 27% above MSRP. In the Bay Area, the biggest markups belong to the Ford Maverick pickup, at 36% ($8,600) over MSRP.

The Genesis and Maverick models offer hybrid engines as options. The Maverick also tops all the markup averages around the nation, especially in the Philadelphia and Jacksonville areas. The high-tech four-door Maverick, introduced in the 2022 model year, is especially popular as a hybrid, its success partly driven by today’s high gasoline prices.

Most dealers don’t deny taking advantage of low new-car inventories caused by supply chain shortages that often cause buyers to wait months before their car or truck of choice arrives. Overall, new car sales in California were down 16% in the first nine months of this year.

But even as state legislators get set for a special session on gasoline price gouging by oil refiners, there’s not much they can do to prevent the unprecedented car price hikes. This is trickling down to used cars too. The iseecars.com study showed huge price increases from last year to this one among many used car models, the leader being the Nissan Leaf electric car, which saw an average price increase of $6,501, or 48%, between June 2021 and June 2022.

The same goes for Chevrolet Camaros, the used-car price of which rose 45% in one year, or $11,200. And the popular Dodge Ram 1500 rose 42% used, or about $12,000. The reason for all this: New ones are hard to find.

The best deals, those with the smallest increases, included late-model Subaru Crosstreks, which increased $3,300, or 15%, in a year and the Mazda CX-3, up $3,100 or 18%. Dealers say their markups are a way to maintain profits while overall auto sales are down.

“They have responded to market conditions by pricing cars above MSRP and making a higher profit on specific models to help offset restricted new car production,” analyst Karl Brauer told a reporter. “In this market, consumers are willing to pay well above sticker price.”

That means the best bottom-line strategy for car buyers seeking new or used models may be to wait. Current gasoline car owners can still find plenty of service stations for fuel. Cars built up to 15 years ago are more durable than previous versions, so waiting until conditions improve might pay off, even with gasoline at near-record prices.

There’s no likelihood of a windfall profit tax on car dealers, even if one is imposed on oil companies. That leaves any penalties for price-gouging car dealers strictly up to individual consumers.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

“This shortage is caused mainly by housing prices,” claims Matthew Lewis, an official of California YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), the Oakland-based group dedicated to creating hundreds of thousands of new housing units very soon. YIMBY has lobbied long and hard for all the housing density laws passed by state legislators over the last several years, most notably the 2021 measures known as Senate Bills 9 and 10, which effectively ended R-1 (single-family) zoning throughout the state.

Voters have not yet had a chance to decide the ultimate fate of those measures, but opponents hope to place referendums on the 2024 ballot to kill them and restore R-1 zoning where it was before. Some local voters will decide long before then, though, on proposals from schools to help ease their teacher shortage by providing subsidized affordable housing for school employees on surplus school property.

With enrollments dropping in many school districts since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one seemingly reasonable estimate says school districts now own about 75,000 acres of surplus land. One such property is the 2.5-acre site of the shut-down James Flood Elementary School in the eastern portion of Menlo Park on the Peninsula, near Highway 101. The land is owned by the Ravenswood School District, which serves eastern Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.

Ravenswood officials plan to sign a developer and build approximately 80 to 90 affordable units on the land, beside a city park. The Flood school was closed in 2012 and later demolished, leaving the land vacant with a park beside it.

The site is designated as a housing “opportunity” by Menlo Park’s planned housing element for the years 2023 to 2031. Ravenswood officials say teachers and other school employees would have the first right to apply for new housing there.

At the same time, the prospective development could provide about $500,000 yearly for the Ravenswood budget. Per-pupil spending in that district is well below levels in the neighboring Menlo Park City School District.

“This is important because teachers are not applying for jobs because they cannot afford housing locally and don’t want to commute for several hours daily to jobs in cities like Menlo Park from distant cities where housing is cheaper,” said Lewis.

Already, thousands of Bay Area workers who cannot operate from home are forced to commute from places like Tracy and Modesto, while their Los Angeles and Orange County counterparts commute from points including Santa Clarita, Bakersfield and Moreno Valley, piling up several hundred freeway miles each week.

No sooner had the Flood development been announced, though, before neighbors began complaining. Now a local initiative designed to block it or reduce it considerably will appear on next month’s ballot. When Menlo Park’s City Council and citizen groups failed to work out a compromise, that initiative remained intact. Strong sentiment against the project by many area residents emerged in a public meeting last spring.

“I’m very much in favor of affordable housing,” declared one longtime homeowner quoted in news reports. “But not to the detriment of the neighborhoods we love.”

Added another, “There is a need for affordable housing but just not here.”

It’s rare for NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiments to be expressed so frankly and openly.

The local initiative will be voted on citywide, though, and the location essentially means most of Menlo Park would not be directly affected by the project. So its fate is uncertain.

This all may be a harbinger of what’s coming across California over the next decade or so. With all that vacant land and school salaries too low to allow many teachers to buy or rent homes near their jobs, be certain that similar projects will be planned in more and more places.

Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

These competing initiatives aim to legalize what once was criminal in this state. Legalizing onetime vices seems to have become a ballot-box favorite. The recent history of marijuana laws makes this clear, as voters first approved medical marijuana and later passed full recreational use of marijuana.

The history of legal gambling in California is only slightly less telling. Voters in 2000 approved gambling on once-poor and desolate Native American reservations by an overwhelming 65-to-35% margin. They later drew a line and in 2004 refused to allow slot machines in urban card rooms and horse race tracks. In 2008, though, tribal compacts vastly expanding the number of slot machines on some reservations were approved easily.

Now come Props. 26 and 27, both aiming to legalize sports betting, a huge pastime from which Californians have been formally excluded. This still sends many thousands from our state to Nevada for live betting and onto illicit offshore websites for online wagers.

It’s still unclear what would happen if both initiatives pass. If there’s a precedent here, it could be the 1978 battle between the Prop. 13 property tax limits and milder limits in the rival Prop. 10. In that case, both passed, with 13 getting more votes and standing as untouchable law ever since.

The betting initiatives differ widely: Prop. 26 allows sports betting but only in person at casinos on semi-sovereign reservations and at four horse race tracks. It would also let casino tribes sue cardrooms over some games they offer, while allowing dice games and roulette at Native American casinos.

Meanwhile, Prop. 27, backed by online giants like FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM, legalizes online sports betting but would see the big operators each partner with American Indian tribes. Fully 85% of tax revenue produced from this would be earmarked for housing and to help solve homelessness.

Both measures provide avenues for almost unlimited growth of the interest groups behind them. It’s hard to see how they could co-exist, so the strong likelihood is for drawn-out legal battles over which one will govern if both pass.

So far, more than five dozen casino tribes are backing Prop. 26, which they see as their ticket to even more prosperity than they now enjoy. Most likely, more Native Americans would gain wealth under 26 than with 27, where the bulk of the money would go to the big gaming companies and a relative pittance to aid the unhoused.

The measures promise to make new money for many tribes that already rake in plenty, but the measures contain precious little to protect gambling addicts from losing whatever savings they may have. Today’s tribal gambling, confined for the most part to reservations, also does little to protect gamblers from addiction. At least now, however, they usually must go to tribal lands to engage in their habit.

Cardroom operators, longtime exploiters of loopholes in restrictive state laws, complain that if Prop. 26 passes it will prevent them from ever getting into games they now cannot run but which remain potential sources of riches. Their committee, with the pious-sounding name “Taxpayers against Special Interest Monopolies,” says 26 would “guarantee tribal casinos a near-monopoly on all gaming in California, adding roulette, craps and sports wagering to their current monopoly on slot machines.”

All this leaves little doubt that we’re seeing a contest between heavily monied interests over who will become the most wealthy. That’s why, having raised more than $300 million before July Fourth, this campaign will likely become the most expensive state electoral contest ever of any type.

The healthiest response from voters would be to reject both measures, but given the pent-up demand for sports betting in California and voters’ prior approval of things long considered vices, that’s not likely to happen. That means big-time sports betting will soon arrive here, with a corps of lawyers likely to decide its eventual shape and scope.

Tom D. Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

Oops! Looks like that statement is two years early. Or is it?

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who won 56% of the June primary vote, still needs one more ratification at the polls, where he won election in 2018 and easily beat back a recall effort almost exactly one year ago. His Republican opponent this fall took just less than 18% of the primary vote, though, so Newsom does not exactly have a fight on his hands.

That’s why he was able to head out of state for a week over the July 4 holiday and take other family vacations in places like Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and some Central American destinations.

That’s also why he was able to spend well over $100,000 in campaign funds donated to his gubernatorial fund on television commercials and newspaper ads in Florida and Texas, essentially bagging on those states’ GOP governors, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, for things like banning some books from public schools, making it difficult for elementary school teachers to discuss gender roles and doing what they can to make abortions as illegal as possible.

“Freedom,” said Newsom, hair slicked back as usual and wearing an open-necked Western-style shirt as he faced the TV camera in his spots, “it’s under attack in your state. Republican leaders, they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors. I urge all of you … to join the fight. Or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom — freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and the freedom to love.”

This was Newsom using his campaign war chest, which topped $23 million at midsummer, with no need to spend much at home, in a campaign to become the country’s de facto leader of the Democratic Party.

Sure, he drew derision from Republicans, including DeSantis, who correctly took Newsom’s ad as an attack on him. The Florida governor, who has targeted California’s Walt Disney Co. — the Disney World resort of which outside Orlando is Florida’s largest employer with more than 62,000 workers — for extra taxes ever since the firm opposed his restrictions on talking to schoolchildren about the LGBT community.

DeSantis lashed back at Newsom, blasting “soul-crushing COVID lockdowns that lasted years in California” and calling California “the most over-regulated, overbearing, overtaxed state in the union.”

Of course, the COVID-19 lockdowns he excoriated spared at least 40,000 California lives during the first two years of the pandemic, compared to what the death toll here would have been if Newsom had used a “keep everything open” approach like Florida’s. The question is whether saving businesses and employees some great inconvenience would have been worth all those lost lives.

Newsom’s ad was actually a continuation of his effort last spring to fire up national Democrats, whom he portrayed as lethargic after the early release of a draft of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end federal abortion rights. Newsom pushed hard for a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights in California, on the ballot this fall as Proposition 1, and lambasted his own party almost as strongly as he criticized Republicans for rubber-stamping the three Donald Trump high court appointees behind his year’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Given the low approval poll ratings for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, he might be all his party has if it wants to avoid a second term of Trump or a Trumpist figure like DeSantis in the White House. He stands a chance of towering over the Democratic field after this year’s midterm elections.

Going after DeSantis lets him promote himself while still denying he’s running for president. It’s clear that one of his pitches in any presidential run would be that Republicans are “pro-government-mandated birth, not pro-life.” He notes that they consistently oppose funding for prenatal care, early education and the Affordable Care Act — better known as “Obamacare.”

“They’re pro-birth, and then you’re on your own,” he said, adding that “I can’t take any more of this. Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, calling this out? Where’s the counteroffensive?”

Newsom’s own counteroffensive and his 2024 campaign may have begun with his summertime ads.

Tom D. Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.

Yet, there is some commonality: Most mass crimes committed with firearms in this state over the last several years were perpetrated by shooters aged 21 and under. Just like recent massacres in Texas, Illinois, Buffalo, NY and many other places.

But gun mortality rates in California are far lower than in other states, especially the big ones we are most often and most appropriately compared with.

In 2020, researchers say, this state’s rate of firearm deaths was one of the lowest in America, at 8.5 per 100,000 residents. That compared with 13.7 per 100,000 nationally and in Florida and 14.2 per 100,000 in Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott prompted state legislators last year to make open and closed (hidden) carry pretty much a universal right. All this came before the U.S. Supreme Court this summer made open and closed carry essentially a nationwide right for adults.

While some Californians will die and have died in shootups like the 2019 Poway synagogue incident and a springtime Sacramento mass killing, residents of this state are about 25 percent less likely to die from a bullet wound than other Americans.

That is thanks to a panoply of state laws, some governing ammunition purchase, some dealing with background checks and others with age limits.

These laws are one reason we don’t hear much about “Saturday Night Specials” anymore. Those were cheap handguns with low standards for design and safety, readily available for street-corner purchase. Recent California laws  cut that trade far below its previous levels. Now we hear more about “ghost guns,” often home-built from designs available on the Internet.

One new law pushed and quickly signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this year will use the principle okayed by the Supreme Court when it ruled a current Texas anti-abortion law constitutional:

The Texas law allows private citizens to sue anyone who promotes or assists an abortion in any way, even if the plaintiff has never met the abortion patient or provider. That law puts anyone who helps a woman get the procedure at risk for major monetary penalties.

Newsom has now put makers, designers, dealers and on-line promoters of ghost guns at similar risk.

There’s also a Newsom effort to make Californians much more aware than they are today about the state’s 2014 “red flag” law, allowing family members and a few others to request court orders forbidding firearm access for persons with mental illness or emotional problems, considering them risks to themselves and others.

This law has been little used, but the gun lobby is now working to stymie proposals for similar rules in other states, alleging they violate the Constitution’s Second Amendment. So far, there are few signs this idea will catch on significantly across the nation. Still, Newsom promised last month to invest $11 million in state education funds to promote it here.

President Biden wants national laws to go much farther than California’s in controlling firearms, asking for a ban on private ownership of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines often used in school shootings and other multi-fatal incidents.

He also wants to eliminate the federal law giving gun makers immunity from financial liability when their products are used to kill dozens, as in Uvalde, Tex., and the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings in Connecticut.

The bottom line: Newsom is right in saying California is safer – even if far from completely safe – because of its gun laws. And if, as is often intoned piously, we’re all in this together, let’s see more states adopt the kind of laws that now protect Californians more than most others.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.

That’s because Manson’s surviving, still-imprisoned followers continually apply for parole and their requests are repeatedly okayed by California’s Parole Board, leaving it up to successive governors to make sure these heinous criminals remain where they belong, behind bars.

Gavin Newsom’s turn at this has come up a couple of other times, and he’s up again right now. He has until late October to review the file of killer Patricia Krenwinkel and decide whether to let the 74-year-old walk or make another contribution to keeping all the Mansons in prison.

It’s not that folks like Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten and Charles “Tex” Watson and Bruce Davis, vicious killers all, and all now in their 70s, figure as much of a danger to society if paroled. Few 70-year-old parolees ever become violent.

Their companion and getaway car driver Linda Kasabian has never gotten in new trouble as she’s moved from place to place after escaping any jail time because she turned state’s evidence during the early’70s Manson family trial.

What keeps the remaining Manson minions in prison now is that, as former Gov. Jerry Brown once put it while denying parole to a “family” member, “ In rare circumstances, a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of current dangerousness by itself. This is such a case.”

The Manson crimes primarily took place in two locations during August 1969. Krenwinkel admittedly participated at both, chasing coffee heiress Abigail Folger around the Beverly Hills-area estate of actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski, before stabbing her numerous times, leading to Folger’s death. The next night, she joined the Manson raid on the Los Feliz district home of grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in Los Angeles, scribbling anti-police slogans on a wall in Mrs. LaBianca’s blood.

It happens that the latest parole recommendation landed on Newsom’s desk during a reelection campaign in which Republicans are blasting him for allegedly being soft on crime.

Republican challenger Brian Dahle, a state senator from Lassen County, promises to send more funds to police and sheriffs and replace Newsom-appointed parole board members who he says have been too accommodating to dangerous felons. Dahle also would push to change Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot initiative Newsom supported, that reclassified some felony drug and theft offenses as misdemeanors and raised from $400 to $950 the amount for which thefts can be prosecuted as felonies.

Newsom would play into Dahle’s hands were he to parole a Manson murderer like Krenwinkel. He would take heat similar to what Brown’s father, 1960s Gov. Pat Brown, took for vacillating over the execution of the so-called “red light bandit,” Caryl Chessman, who kidnapped and raped multiple women after abducting them from their cars while they stopped for traffic signals.

By her own testimony one of the most vicious of the Manson murderers, Krenwinkel maintains she has changed, her attorney arguing that “she has so thoroughly completed that transformation that she must be released, even if we are horrified by what she did.”

That’s essentially the claim made for every imprisoned follower of Manson, who always denied ordering any killings.

But the argument has never flown before, and even though Newsom’s message denying parole will say nothing about it, the political situation makes a release this year all but impossible.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.