by Marshall Lewin
Last December, five members of San Francisco's
board of supervisors submitted to the Department of Elections a
proposed law that would ban the possession of handguns and the sale,
manufacture and transfer of all firearms and ammunition in the city
and county of San Francisco. The proposal has been placed on the
November 8 special election ballot.
If a simple majority of voters approves
Proposition H on that day, the ban will take effect on Jan. 1,
2006.
After that, San Francisco gun owners will have 90
days to surrender their firearms to authorities. Since all handgun
sales are now registered in California, confiscation of firearms from
honest, peaceable citizens will presumably begin sometime soon after
that.
"It's just the worst kind of political cynicism,"
said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. "San Francisco's
city fathers either can't or won't control armed violent criminals,
and now they want to shift the blame for their own dereliction onto
honest gun owners and Second Amendment freedom."Not only is that
dishonest," LaPierre continued, "but it could also prove deadly.
Washington, D.C., and Chicago have proven the point for decades now:
When you disarm honest people, you empower predators and victimize
the innocent."
Compounding Failure with Fraud
Supervisor Chris Daly, the 29-year-old chief
sponsor of the ban, who grabbed headlines last November by shouting
an obscenity at members of the public who had attended a committee
hearing, claims the reason he proposed the gun ban for San Francisco
was because of the city's escalating murder and violent crime
rates.
Although San Francisco's murder rate did jump by
24 percent--from 71 homicides in 2003 to 88 in 2004--it's by no means
clear that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is the problem, or that
disarming lawful citizens is the solution.
According to Chuck Michel, an attorney for the
California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), San Francisco already
has more local gun-control ordinances than any other city in the
state of California.
In 2000, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
passed a law that holds gun manufacturers, importers and retailers
financially liable for "all direct and consequential damages" of
gun-related deaths or injuries, whether or not the firearms were
defective and whether or not the manufacturers, importers or dealers
were negligent.
Even though no gang-banger has seen fit to carry a
four-foot-long, 30-pound, $7,000 rifle on the street, the city banned
ownership of .50 caliber rifles, solving another non-problem with
another non solution.
They banned so-called "Saturday Night Specials,"
their focus group-tested demon term for affordable
handguns.
They banned so-called "ultra compact handguns"
whose only offending characteristic is being less than about 6 3/4
inches long, or 4 1/2 inches high.
Every firearm transfer, even between friends, must
go through a California licensed and federally-licensed dealer. Every
firearm purchased --handgun or long gun--requires a waiting period of
10 days. Every hand-gun purchaser is registered with the California
Department of Justice.
It goes on and on, as eternal as the
spring.
Last April, San Francisco Supervisor Gerardo
Sandoval pushed a ban on gun shows, arguing that the mere presence of
a gun show is "insulting" to San Franciscans, and that "banning gun
shows would send a profound message of respect to the nearby
citizens."
"Does it really show more 'respect' for San
Francisco citizens to give them empty sentiment instead of real
safety?" asked LaPierre. "What good is it to pass laws against
honest, law-abiding people when the laws against violent, armed,
dangerous people aren't enforced?"
San Francisco could surely be called a test case
in that respect.
More Laws, Less Enforcement
Indeed, despite having more anti-gun laws than any
other city in California, San Francisco was also less successful than
any other large city in California at actually enforcing those
laws.
In 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle
released the results of a seven-month computer analysis of San
Francisco Police Department records and found that, "Violent
criminals who prey on San Francisco's residents and visitors have a
better chance of getting away with their crimes than predators in any
other large American city."
"Violent
criminals who prey on San Francisco's residents and
visitors have a better chance of getting away with their
crimes than predators in any other large American
city."
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Between 1996 and 2000, according to the Chronicle,
police solved only
28 percent of the city's murders, rapes,
robberies, shootings, stabbings and aggravated assaults--the lowest
crime clearance rate in any of America's 20
biggest cities.
For comparison, the national average was 42
percent. In San Jose, 50 minutes down the bay from San Francisco, the
average clearance rate was 49 percent.
As the Chronicle's staff writers pointed
out, "Despite having more resources and less crime than many other
big cities, the (San Francisco) department solved just half of the
murders and less than a third of the rapes reported in the city
during the five years studied."
Worse yet, of the few criminals who actually are
caught, fewer still see any significant punishment, since San
Francisco's "enlightened" leaders lack either the stomach or the
backbone to allow the law to serve as it was intended.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Kamala D. Harris the
city's chief law enforcement officer, implemented a new "zero
tolerance" charging policy for so-called "gun crimes." Under this new
policy, Harris recommended that anyone convicted of carrying a
concealed firearm be sentenced to at least three months in jail, and
that anyone in possession of a so-called "assault weapon"--whose
definition changes in California with the weather--be charged with a
felony. CRPA's Michel said, "While we applaud efforts to go after
violent felons, Cali fornia's gun control laws are incredibly
complex. Accidental violations by good people are common."
"What's really scary and outrageous," said NRA-ILA
Executive Director Chris W. Cox, "is that San Francisco apparently
can't catch criminals very well, it won't prosecute those it does
catch, and now it wants to deny citizens their constitutional right
to protect themselves from those very same criminals. It's all just a
diversionary tactic."
As Cox points out, Chicago and Washington, D.C.,
are poster children for the tragic failure of that kind of
thinking.
Unconditional Surrender
Washington, D.C., banned all handguns in
1976.
Chicago banned the sale and acquisition of
handguns in 1982.
If San Francisco's Board of Supervisors really
wanted to protect its citizens from crime, they would run, not walk,
from the mere idea of banning civilian handgun ownership.
Economist John R. Lott, then of the University of
Chicago Law School, did an exhaustive, year-by-year analysis of crime
trends in all 3,054 counties of the U.S., and from that research
wrote the authoritative book More Guns, Less Crime.
According to Lott, the Washington, D.C., and
Chicago gun bans have done far more harm than good. He points out
that in the five years prior to the Washington, D.C., gun ban, the
capital city's per-capita murder rate fell by 27%. After the ban,
that trend reversed.
In fact, within five years, Washington's
per-capita murder rate climbed by 3%. Robberies spiked by nearly 63%.
With all lawfully-owned firearms required to be disassembled,
unloaded and locked up under D.C.'s "safe storage" mandates,
residents weren't even safe in their own homes anymore: In five
years, burglaries increased by 56%.
"The five-year trends are not some aberration,"
Lott wrote in National Review Online. "In fact, while murder
rates have varied over time, during the almost 30 years since the
ban, the murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in
1976."
Chicago's gun ban, Lott found, also ushered in a
new era of crime.
"Chicago's gun ban didn't work at all when it came
to reducing violence," Lott wrote. "Its murder rate fell from 27 to
22 per 100,000 in the five years before the law, and then rose
slightly to 23. The change is even more dramatic when compared to
five neighboring Illinois counties: Chicago's murder rate fell from
being 8.1 times greater than its neighbors in 1977 to 5.5 times in
1982 (when the gun ban was passed), and then went way up to 12 times
greater in 1987."
Indeed, New York City's population is well over
twice that of Chicago's, yet in 2003, some 599 murders were committed
in Chicago--three more murders than in New York.
Why California Endangers Your
Rights
San Francisco voters who care about their safety
would be wise to pay heed. As things stand now, the San Francisco
handgun ban--Prop H-- will be on the November 8 ballot. The NRA is
fighting to defeat the proposition, and to fight it in court if it is
accepted by San Francisco voters.
"People seem to think that what happens in
California doesn't affect them, or that they can just wall off
California and not worry about what happens here," Michel said, "but
what people need to understand is that California is the source of a
lot of the anti-gun strategies we see all over the
country.
"Anti-gun lawyers in San Francisco are using
millions of dollars in block grants from leftist foundations to come
up with creative legal theories and then market those theories and
offer their assistance to anti-gun groups in other
states."
LaPierre agreed: "For decades, California has been
the staging ground, or test case, for anti-gun activists. Over and
over again, we've seen anti-gun proposals go straight from Sacramento
to the halls of the U.S. Congress. So we're going to fight this
latest anti-gun gambit--not just for the sake of California's gun
owners, but for the Second Amendment freedoms of every
American."
