“You clearly want more innocent children to die if you don’t pass more gun control laws.” You can try and dress it up, but that’s the gist of the marketing pitch for gun-control.
Of course, you have to ignore the millions of violent crimes prevented and lives saved in defensive gun uses each year for that kind of emotional appeal to have even a prayer of making any sense. What is passing strange is that lawyers for the state of California are trying to sell a similar sales pitch to the Ninth Circuit Court Court of Appeals.
This story started last year when the US Supreme Court confirmed that ordinary citizens have the right to bear arms in public. More to the point, governments have violated our rights when they exercised their “discretion” on who could bear arms.
In reply to that federal ruling, anti-rights states like California discovered a new cause. Urged on by campaign donations from anti-gun billionaires, the legislature made a surprising discovery. The places where trained, certified, and licensed citizens had been carrying guns for decades were suddenly deemed to be “sensitive” places. Who knew?
California’s SB2 made almost every public place and commercial location into a new “gun-free” zone. In theory, we understand places like a jails, prisons, and courtrooms can be sensitive places. We’re legally prohibited from carrying personal firearms in those locations. The state is responsible for our physical safety in those places because we’ve been disarmed as we pass through security check points to get there.
But here are a few of the places that California has turned into disarmed-good-guy zones.
California has said that hospitals, nursing homes, medical offices, and urgent care facilities are now gun-free zones. So are the parking lots of those places. That means honest citizens can’t go armed to business that share a parking lot with doc-in-a-box urgent care offices.
I’ve been to my share of urgent care facilities and I’ve never seen a cop guarding any of them. What you might not know is that people are attacked in hospitals and their parking lots. Even in California. Criminals like to rob weak people as they cross the lot, sometimes while carrying drugs.
I know there isn’t a policeman or sheriff’s deputy at every bus, train, and ferry terminal. There isn’t a cop at every restaurant chain where you can buy a beer. There isn’t a security fence or magnetometer at every concert or public gathering. There certainly isn’t much security at many schools or playgrounds. None of that seems to matter, though, because the California legislature has decreed that honest licensed citizens should be disarmed in those locations.
But its for the children! Don’t you care about them?
The great minds and caring individuals who make the laws in California want you to be disarmed anyway. And they won’t be blamed for the rising violent crime rate. To be fair, those facts probably don’t matter much to a majority of judges on the Ninth Circuit either. These are exactly the consequences we warned Californians about before the last election.
Right now, the California “gun-free” zone law is enjoined while the case is being argued. Here is the full listof prohibited places where honest citizens are disarmed under SB2. Good luck, Californians.
This article originally appeared at Slow Facts Blog and is reprinted here with permission.