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Breakin'
the law, breakin' the law
By
Joshua Citrak
The root of idiocy is ideology. A frantic dogma that decries any noble thought or determined will to personal or public betterment be rammed forward towards policy or action without concern for reality. A parental scolding by finger wagging officials whom we’ve elected to know better than us because, as any parent will tell you, ‘it’s for our own good’.
Such is the perpetual mind frame within the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, resulting most recently in
no TV for a week and a proposed ban on all handguns within the confines of our humble city.
This initiative was filed the week of December 12th 2004 by Supervisors Chris Daly, Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty and Michela Alioto-Pier- collectively know as,
‘The San Francisco Brain Trust for Practicality and Common
Sense’.
On paper, in utopia, this proposed ban may seem like a reasonable and well intentioned objective. After all, everyone knows that guns are evil, terrible things, regardless of what Hume said about objects being neither inherently good nor evil.
During the past year, San Francisco saw the murder rate increase by nearly 15%, to 88 people, out gunning our notorious Oakland neighbors for the first time in years. Something must be done.
Well, in 1976, Washington D.C. had much the same dilemma- rising violence, drug epidemic, know-it-all politicians, hypnotic public. They also decided something must be done. They banned all guns. Yet the pesky things kept popping up to kill people. No one took into account that 75% of all guns used in crimes are obtained illegally and that banning guns just took them out of the hands of lawful citizens. As a result, a twenty-five year continuous rise in violent crime that lead the city to be the envied two time winner of ‘Murder Capital of the U.S.’ award, peaking out last year at 252 murders per 900,000 people. San Francisco, disappointedly, came in 24th among major metropolitan areas.
Still, in evidence of the above, the fact the D.C. is now repealing the failed law and of the futile gun control experiments in Chicago, San Francisco must push blindly ahead.
“You’ve got to keep guns away from kids,” said Alioto-Pier, who said she was concerned about guns falling into the wrong hands. “We’re not taking away people’s constitutional rights…”
(the right of the people to keep and bear
arms… whoops!) “It’s about insuring the safety of people who live here.”
Newly elected Ross Mirkarimi, second string Matt Gonzalez wanna-be, agrees, even though he is (gasp!) a gun owner.
“How many Michael Moore films does it take to tell us that the Second Amendment is absolutely archaic and other nations do it better than we do?”
The ridiculousness of his statement, backed up by nothing other than popular leftist opinion, shows, if nothing else, the stupidity and blind arrogance of
an official elected with only 7,000 votes at 28% of his
constituency.
But, let’s look at the ‘other nations’ who do it so much better than
we. There’s England, pushing fifty years on gun bans, who led by a three to one margin over the next closest developed nation in all violent crime last year. There’s
Australia, who since their gun ban in ’97, have seen their armed robbery rate climb 116%. The U.S., which Mirkarimi deemed an archaic, violent country, has murder rates lower than its Western European brethren
France and
Germany, too.
Let us also turn to the practicality both socially and fiscally of such a ban. Although guns in California must be registered, residents are not required to have permits for guns kept in private homes or businesses. How the city of San Francisco intends to confiscate all handguns remains a vague mystery with the Supes hoping citizens, ‘voluntarily give up their guns at local police stations’. Seems reasonable because we all know gun owners to be only marginally attached to their weapons. The only other way to properly enact the ban would be illegally snooping through Federal files to obtain the names and Social Security Numbers of suspected gun owners (read: every single citizen of San Francisco). And call me crazy but that sounds suspiciously right-winged Patriot Act-esque for such a ‘liberal and progressive’ political board.
How a fiscally challenged city such as San Francisco tends to go about financing this ban, its enforcement and the legal challenges it is already incurring seems to be but a mere trifle to our fearless Supervisors, whose ‘my way is the right (left) way’ has proved no concern for the amount of taxpayer money it spends to force its ideals upon us while the
social
programs, health
care, welfare and homeless agendas it claims to care about languish on the
budgetary cutting
board.
I could turn this into a war of statistics. I could say that 88 people were murdered in San Francisco last year. I could say that one half of them, 44, were
linked to drugs and gangs. I could also say that
51% of the remaining 44, were linked specifically to lawful handguns, the rest scattered among other weaponry including vehicles, briefcases and a large
elephant. Twenty-two instances of armed crime have all guns being made a scapegoat for policy failures of the city. The only affect a ban, whether it be marijuana, stem cell research or guns has on a populace, is to hurt the people who would benefit from its lawful use. Criminals are called so because they
BREAK THE
LAW. This gun ban isn’t any more of a deterrent to crime than the death penalty or special circumstances laws already on the books. Let’s save ourselves some headache, heartache and money by voting down this initiative when and if it comes up next election.
Copyright © 2005 Joshua Citrak
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