San Jose’s city council passed a measure last month requiring gun owners to pay a $25 “harm reduction” fee and purchase liability insurance or relinquish their firearms to the government, making the city the first in the nation to impose an annual fee on law-abiding, firearm owning citizens.
This from thegatewaypundit.com.
The city’s Democrat mayor, Sam Liccardo insists the new ordinance, allowing law enforcement officials to seize firearms from those who refuse to pay the fees, will ultimately reduce crime and establish “a new kind of framework for gun safety, Slate reports.
Using goofball logic, Mayor Liccardo must have been assuming guns are unsafe and San Jose’s problem not illegal behavior when he told the publication that seizing firearms from those who refuse to pay the fee will ultimately reduce crime.
What? Please, try to keep an open mind here, mayor. Logic 101 will explain your premise that guns are bad destroys your entire theory. First, what is San Jose’s root problem, crime or guns?
Mayor Liccardo argued, “For example, there’s a bar brawl and they’re patting down everybody and someone’s got a gun. ‘Have you paid your fee? You have insurance?’ ‘No.’ OK, well, there’s an opportunity for us to remove the gun. And then when the gun owner comes back and demonstrates that they comply with the law and they’re a lawful gun owner, they get their gun back. But in the meantime, you’ve taken a gun out of a bar brawl. And that’s not a bad thing.”
This is certainly goofball unconnected logic used to explain a faulty premise.
The fees paid by firearm owners will be allocated to “experts” who “understand domestic violence prevention programs, suicide prevention” to create a non-profit that will assist lawmakers with developing firearm “safety,” Liccardo explained.
“We’re forming a 501(c)(3) foundation, which is going to receive the dollars, and the board, which will be comprised of a host of folks, including, for example, Stanford professors, an epidemiologist who has been focused on gun harm, and nonprofit experts who understand domestic violence prevention programs, suicide prevention,” he said. “We’ve invited and at least one member of a gun group has actually joined this effort to create this nonprofit, because we want organizations representing gun owners to be at the table, helping us to understand, how do we best communicate, how do we best invest? “
While the fee is not a tax, Liccardo argues, Americans should be taxed to practice/exercise their Second Amendment rights.
“We all agree the Second Amendment protects the right for all of us to own or possess a gun,” he said, “but it doesn’t require taxpayers to subsidize that right. And when people become aware of the fact that, hey, whether you own a gun or not, you’re actually paying for this, it starts to get folks thinking about, well, how could we better distribute the costs of gun ownership and gun harm?
“So the fact that there’s a constitutional right attached somewhere to the exercise of a particular activity doesn’t mean it can’t be regulated, taxed, or have a fee imposed. Newspapers pay taxes, even though that’s an important First Amendment right. For the litigants who filed a lawsuit against us who were exercising their Seventh Amendment rights, they paid a filing fee at the courthouse.”
The National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit against the city over its new firearm policy.
Not only is the law an unconstitutional abridgment of the Second Amendment, but it infringes on the First Amendment by requiring firearm owners to fund a yet-to-exist non-profit that could promote initiatives they opposed, Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney representing the plaintiffs contends.
The law compels people to purchase insurance that doesn’t necessarily exist and that demonstrates that this law is not a good faith attempt to do anything other than ban or burden the lawful possession of guns, the lawsuit states.
“The Ordinance even prohibits the city from directing how the non-profit would use the funds. The one thing that is clear is that the organization will likely be dedicated to exclusively preaching the negative risks of gun ownership.”
The NAGR is also seeking declaratory relief which is defined as the court’s judgement stating the rights of parties without ordering any specific action or listing awards or damages.
As democrats so often do, Mayor Liccardo seems to have miss-identified a problem and he has consequently prescribed a solution to solve the wrong problem.
If crime in San Jose is what Mayor Liccardo seeks to reduce, he should seek the opinions of legal gun owners. Odds are guns will be defined as tools of safety not tools of crime. And odds are fewer guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens will bring about increased crime.
However, as conservatives well know, liberalism is a mental disorder and there is no such thing as talking logic to a liberal.
Good luck to the law-abiding citizens of San Jose, California.
