U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- The San Jose City Council has approved “sweeping gun control measures” including video recording of transactions and a requirement gun owners purchase “gun liability insurance,” but remarks by at least one council member suggest they paid no attention to the facts of the mass shooting incident that led to the restrictions.
Already, the California-based Firearms Policy Coalition is hinting at a court challenge, according to the San Jose Spotlight.
The incident that precipitated the adoption of what rights activists are already saying is an “extremist” set of new restrictions was the May 26 shooting of nine people at the San Jose VTA rail yard. The killer was identified as a 57-year-old VTA employee who had legally purchased and registered three 9mm pistols, according to FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig Fair, quoted by the Spotlight.
Yet Councilman Dave Cohen was quoted immediately afterward, talking about preventing straw purchases, which the video recording requirement is supposed to prevent. No straw purchase was involved in any way.
Further, the killer—who took his own life—used so-called “high capacity magazines,” which are already illegal in California.
Translation: The state’s existing prohibition did not prevent the gunman from obtaining the contraband magazines.
According to KNTV, the Bay Area NBC affiliate, the new requirement for gun owners to pay an unspecified fee is designed “to offset the damage done by gun violence.”
Translation: Gun owners will be financially penalized for crimes they didn’t commit.
The city acknowledges it will face a court challenge, but officials expressed confidence they will prevail.
Anti-gun Democrat Mayor Sam Liccardo told KNTV “San Jose would become the first city in the United States to require every gun owner to have liability insurance for their firearms.” He justified the fee by asserting, “The 2nd Amendment protects Americans’ rights to own guns, but it does not require that every other taxpayer pay for that right.”
KNTV noted the gun control scheme was “first proposed in 2019 after the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting.” But a check of the facts in that case once again reveals San Jose officials weren’t paying attention.
The Gilroy gunman was a 19-year-old who had grown up in the area but had been living in Walker Lake, Nev. He purchased the rifle used in the shooting from a store in Fallon, Nev. The rifle, an AK-47 variant called the WASR-10 is prohibited in California but legal in Nevada. The perpetrator brought that firearm into the state illegally, along with large capacity magazines prohibited by California law.
Translation: The Gilroy case is a textbook example of California gun control failure, which the San Jose City Council evidently chose to ignore while adopting the new gun control restrictions.
According to KNTV, “The plan also includes everything from bans on ghost guns and assault-style weapons to gun buyback programs and required video recording of all gun sales — something that’s sure to see legal challenges.”
What might those challenges cover? Is videotaping a retail transaction involving the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right an invasion of privacy? Is a prohibition on so-called “ghost guns” and “assault-style weapons” unconstitutional? How can the city “buy back” guns it never owned in the first place, and from whence will the money come for such a program? (If taxpayers can’t be expected to “pay for the right to own guns,” how can they be expected to pay for “buying them back?”)
The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) boldly declared they are putting “Government officials on notice: if you ban constitutionally protected firearms or conduct, we are coming for you.”
In a statement published in its entirety by KNTV, the FPC rebutted each of the city’s points in its gun control package.
According to the San Jose Mercury-News, FPC called the video requirement “Big Brother-style omniveillance.”
In a statement, the group observed, “This Orwellian requirement would be rightly universally opposed were the City to impose similar video and audio-recording mandates in mosques and churches, book stores, or abortion clinics.”
The question nobody has answered because apparently, the media hasn’t bothered to ask, is whether any of these gun control measures will prevent gun-related violent crime or murders. A look at the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2019—the most recent data available—suggests California gun control laws have been failing.
Table 20 of that report reveals California exceeded every other state in the number of homicides, with Texas the nearest runner-up.
With all of its gun control laws in place, California reported 1,679 slayings in 2019, which included 1,142 committed with firearms. More people were fatally stabbed (252) than were killed with rifles of any kind (34). This pattern prevails over the years with the annual FBI reports.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
The post San Jose Adopts ‘Sweeping’ Gun Control with Blinders On to Failures appeared first on AmmoLand.com.
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