Even in the Bay Area, you’ll get a ton of heat for even mentioning the possibility of regulating firearms. Take Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson, who proposed a pair of measures, but ultimately took them off the San Mateo County Supervisors agenda. She still heard it from the NRA crowd:
More than a dozen gun rights advocates spoke out Tuesday against two gun control ordinances proposed by a San Mateo County supervisor.
Although Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson asked at the beginning of the board meeting that both proposed ordinances be pulled from the agenda, that didn’t speakers from attacking the proposals.
“I’m offended you think so little of my civil liberties to actually place this item on the agenda,” said Minder Singh, a resident of an unincorporated part of the county, one of about two dozen people who showed up for the issue. (SJ Merc)
What were the civil liberties at stake here? Well, one ordinance would would ban gun stores within 1,500 feet of schools, parks, and liquor stores, require security on the premises and an annual license. The other ordinance would require registered owners of the guns to report a lost and stolen firearm within 48 hours of knowing that it was lost or stolen.
Yes, that is how toxic gun control has become. Remember when Reagan got shot and gun control was all in vogue? Clearly, those days are over now. Jim Brady’s name is cursed in right-wing meetings across the country. And people like this gentleman are so enraged that people would even consider moving gun shops away from schools and requiring owners to report missing weapons.
Times sure have changed, even in the Bay Area bubble. I guess the 2nd Amendment is just sacrosanct in ways that other amendments aren’t. But hey, what does equal protection of the law matter when you have a cache of weapons?
is an underhanded way of forcing sex offenders out of our communities entirely, often into homelessness.
But when it comes to gun shops, we choose to forget that awareness and pretend that we’re merely “moving gun shops away from schools” (and parks, and liquor stores). As if that were a cost-free and easily met obligation that wasn’t designed to force these businesses from inside city limits altogether.
You wrote the endorsement post in 2006, so you’re not unfamiliar with this “x feet from a park or school” mechanism. It’s not fun watching you pretend not to get it now.
These people aren’t advocating a right to own weapons, they’re advocating weapons be brandished in every possible situation, regardless of public safety or common sense. They won’t rest until kindergarteners are packing heat.
It’s based on a fundamental contempt for society. These people don’t care how many are killed by guns, they view it as an acceptable collateral cost of their ability to strut around like morons with their guns.
Part of the problem is that the gun control movement hasn’t been as active or vocal in pushing back against the gun nuts’ framing. It also doesn’t help when Democrats cave at the first sign of gun nuttery.
I will never love guns and would love to see the day where they are banned from the whole world.
The latter are immersed in the belief that any regulation of any kind is just the “thin edge of the wedge”, the “camel’s nose under the tent”, and the “top of the slippery slope”.
There’s no reasoning with these people. We just have to out-organize them.
But I still question this ordinance. Do gun stores attract young people the way liquor stores do? Do gun stores attract unsavory customers the way adult stores do? Do high-schoolers “hang out” at gun stores after school? If they do, so what? They can’t purchase anything and they probably come from a pro-gun family anyway.
The “security on premises” condition smacks of the kind of regulations that municipalities use to burden and discourage abortion clinics… it doesn’t seem right.
I would regulate gun stores to higher standards of theft prevention, and unregulated “swap meet” sales are another thing I take issue with. Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is hard to argue against… even in Ammoland.