Gun Grabbers In San Jose Try New Approach … Will It Work Or Lose In Court?

Wes WalkerJuly 1, 2021

0 189 5 minutes read

The activist left loves the abstract term ‘gun violence’ but they almost never target its actual source. Instead, they are chasing the low-hanging fruit of legal gun owners… yet again.

This time, we have San Jose’s mayor, Sam Liccardo pushing a plan to address ‘gun violence’. (They really love that euphemism.) He published an OpEd in CNN discussing his plan. But first, here he is tweeting about it.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Yes

Here he is giving us a false dichotomy of platitudes versus action, (forgetting that not every action is equally valid) as he explains his grand plan.

I joined several colleagues to propose a comprehensive set of initiatives to reduce gun-related harm in San Jose. These proposals include two measures that no other city nor state in the United States has ever tried: mandatory gun insurance to support victims, and mandatory gun fees to compensate taxpayers. As with many other Silicon Valley innovations, we intend to implement and test these ideas, learn from our mistakes, improve, iterate and provide a platform for others to scale them to benefit their own communities.

First, we will require every gun owner in my city to have liability insurance, regardless of where they purchased their gun. Insurance compensates the victims of unintentional gun harm — which annually injures 27,000 Americans and claims the lives of 500 more — paying medical bills, rehabilitative needs, and tragically, funeral expenses.

Insurance also incentivizes safe gun ownership, where risk-adjusted premiums might encourage owners to take gun-safety courses, use gun safes or install child-safety locks. In the context of auto safety, insurers rewarding good driving or the use of airbags have reduced per-mile auto fatalities by 80% in five decades, saving 3.5 million lives. We need a similar approach to address unintentional firearm risk, because 4.6 million children live in a household where a gun is kept unlocked and loaded, and three-quarters of gun injuries occur at home.

Second, we will require gun owners to pay a modest annual fee to compensate taxpayers for the cost of gun-related violence. Every day, our residents bear the financial burden for police officers who bravely respond to shootings, for ambulances that transport the wounded, and for trauma surgeons to save them. These direct costs of gun violence to California taxpayers — to say nothing of the costs to victims or their families — exceeded $1.4 billion in 2018, a sum equivalent to the entire General Fund budget of my city, America’s 10th largest. — CNN

It gets better. He is super-excited to answer the question about non-compliance. That’s easy. If a cop shows up at a home, he can ask if there are any guns there. If the owner cannot provide proof of insurance, the cop can now lawfully(?) ‘seize the gun’! It’s such a foolproof plan, right?

Naturally, he’s going to amp up the red flag laws, too.

So basically, he’s going to make gun ownership as burdensome as possible, despite the fact that statistics tell us it isn’t lawful gun owners doing most of the killing in Democrat cities. Statistics show, in fact, lawful and responsible gun owners as a group tend to have lower crime statistics than even law enforcement.

Why is he bothering the lawful gun owners? The answer is simple. It’s the same reason they call it ‘gun violence’ instead of the more accurate term ‘gun crime’. Because ‘crime’ makes you look in a different direction for both causes and solutions than the word ‘violence’ does.

Demonizing and picking fights with law-abiding gun users a far easier than dealing with the real problem of gun crime.

After all, the left’s electoral model has a long track record of proving it far more important (politically) to seem like you are doing something than it is to actually deliver results. If delivering results actually mattered, Dem policy choices would be different on gun crime issues, and pretty much every other.

Think about stop and frisk rules, for instance. It doesn’t matter how useful or effective they have been in the past at curbing crime. The current cultural narrative (a narrative curated largely by Democrats and the media) has deemed them ‘racist’, so we no longer use that tool for getting guns off the streets. If gun-related crime goes up as a result of stopping that practice, Democrats will doubtless find a way to blame lawful gun owners for that as well.

If those politicians really cared about curbing gun crime, they would be attaching serious criminal penalties to any violent crime that involves the use or presence of a gun, and similarly charging convicted felons arrested while in possession of a firearm.

But the Democrats’ dirty secret is that they strongly oppose the idea of cracking down on the real sources of gun crime. Who ultimately pays the real price for their unwillingness to face this issue head-on? It isn’t the elected Democrats with their private security or gated communities. It’s another group.

Here’s a stat tracker from heyjackass which keeps score of murders and shootings in Chicago and now some other cities.

You can go ahead and spout whatever talking point you want to about not wanting to lock anyone away because of prevailing narratives about prison and race, but before you do, take another look at who the victims of these gun crimes really are:

It’s all well and good to speak up for the interests of prisoners who were dealt a craptastic hand in life by a worthless school system led by gutless corrupt politicians in a Democrat stronghold. That’s another conversation that is long overdue, one that the Democrats’ largest donor group (teacher’s unions) will fight like hell to keep us from ever properly addressing

But let’s not forget about the real live people caught in the crossfire. The ones who often need to crowdfund the cost of burying a son or daughter who was taken from them far too soon. To them these aren’t statistics, they are empty chairs at the dinner table.

What does Hizzoner’s grand plan do to prevent any of that, considering it was never the lawful gun owners putting those lives in danger?

It won’t be long before this is challenged in court. Do you suppose it will hold up or get struck down? Let us know in the comments.

Cross-posted with Clash Daily

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