San Jose City Council to force owners of legal firearms to pay for costs of progressive policies
On June 29, the San Jose City Council unanimously passed ordinances requiring "every gun owner to buy liability insurance coverage for their firearms" and also to "pay a fee to compensate taxpayers for the emergency medical and police responses to gun-related injuries and deaths," the San Francisco Chronicle reported. San Jose is the first city in the United States to enact such a radical — and preposterously unconstitutional — anti-gun stance.
Shortly before the vote, an organization called the Pacific Institute on Research and Evaluation (PIRE) released a preliminary report stating that gun violence in San Jose costs the city approximately $442 million annually. Officials have yet to decide on the amount of the fee that legal gun-owners will now be forced to pay.
Predictably, far-left Democratic mayor Sam Liccardo praised the measures and reportedly argued that gun-owners who refuse to comply with the new laws would have their weapons seized. Liccardo issued a statement reading: "While the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize gun ownership. We won't magically end gun violence, but we will stop paying for it."
San Jose City Council debated the law on a Zoom virtual meeting.
YouTube screen grab.
Everything about the measures is tyrannical and counterproductive. The unprecedented ordinances are sure to be challenged in court by firearm rights groups. One such group, the Firearms Policy Coalition, has already planned legal action. The FPC put out a statement reading in part:
All states and local governments must comply with the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment, period. The days of governments doing whatever they wish to impose expansive, unconstitutional gun control laws are numbered. We will work tirelessly to bring your tyrannical efforts to a crashing halt, and are committed to restoring human liberty and freedom using every available resource. If San Jose adopts Mayor Liccardo's outrageous and unconstitutional gun control proposals, we will not hesitate to challenge the City's policies in federal litigation and take every possible action to block their enforcement.
The gun rights group went on to refute each piece of the council's (10-point) plan, explaining why each specific measure is unconstitutional.
Legal firearm-owners must reimburse taxpayers for emergency medical and police responses to gun-related injuries and deaths? The vast majority of legal gun-owners are taxpayers themselves, unlike many others in the city. And legal gun ownership prevents far more crime, injuries, death, property destruction, and monetary loss than it causes.
Is the San Jose City Council also going to enact laws forcing spoon-owners to pay for the staggering costs that obesity inflicts on society? If spoon owners refuse to comply, will they have their beloved spoons seized by the city? Or will those like Nancy Pelosi, who own wildly expensive freezers specifically designated to hold their vast collections of custom ice creams, have to pay for these costs? California is wine country, but why shouldn't those with a wine cellar have to pay for the terrible costs of alcoholism? Or those who own a shot glass?
In reality (a scary place Democrats/progressives/leftists never visit), it's the city council's own policies — and other leftist lunatics' policies on a local and national basis — that cause the destruction of the family, breakdown of morality, dismissal of religion, subsidizing of immoral and destructive behavior, and punishment of traditional Judeo-Christian values that lead to the poverty, addiction, soullessness, and hopelessness that cause crime. Oh, and defunding the police doesn't help, either. It isn't rocket science. In fact, it's a simple case of good versus evil.
If our elite progressive rulers were actually worried about "justice," they would be compensating taxpayers, preferably by not using the money they take from them to make things worse. If they really wanted to be social justice warriors, they would resign. Or become conservatives.
Until they do, the rest of us need to stick to our guns.
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.