The city of Sacramento is getting ready to push a series of gun control laws into being. One of them is a requirement that all gun owners have "liability insurance" and pay a fee to exercise a constitutionally protected right.
It's what most people call "a poll tax" no matter how they slice it.
But the reason is, they claim, that it will reduce violent crime. It'll do nothing of the sort.
First, their own words on the topic:
The proposal, introduced to the city council by Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Councilmember Lisa Kaplan, would enact four rule changes to the city’s firearm and weapons codes.
It passed unanimously out of the Law and Legislative Committee Tuesday and now heads to the full council for a vote.
“This proposal is not going to solve gun violence in our city, but is a step in the right direction and the beginning of the changing of the culture. These gun proposals are starting the conversation to create change we need in our city to reduce gun violence, especially among our youth," Kaplan said in a statement to ABC10.
Two such changes would require gun owners to obtain liability insurance to cover losses and damages from accidental use of firearms, and a new annual $25 harm reduction fee would be instituted for gun owners on each gun they own. The future funds would go to a nonprofit focused on gun violence education and prevention.
The idea that this will even be a move in the right direction is absolute nonsense.
First, most guns used in violent crime are used by criminals. Just as your car insurance won't cover a wreck caused by the guy who stole your car, requiring any form of liability insurance wouldn't do anything to deal with violent crime.
Yet even if the perpetrator of a violent crime has insurance, they're still not going to cover anything. Insurance doesn't cover the willful commission of a crime. It never has and never will. It might help cover the bills for someone injured in a negligent shooting, but not an intentional one. That's just now how insurance works.
So this won't impact literally any violent crime at all, so just how is this any kind of move in the right direction? The notion strains credibility so far that George Santos seems more credible.
As for the "harm reduction fee," that's nothing more than a jobs program for anti-gun activists and we all know it. First, that fee is being levied on law-abiding citizens, not the people actually committing acts that harm others.
Meanwhile, both of these actually work to hurt the economically disadvantaged--or, as we used to call them, poor people. It drives up the costs for owning a gun to a degree where even people who can lawfully get a gun might instead opt to do so illegally just to bypass this particular flavor of stupid.
So rather than deter crime, it may actually create more criminals.
Absolutely brilliant. Just par for the course for California's anti-gunners.
This is another case of lies, damned lies, and the anti-gun narrative.