San Jose’s gun law leaves officers unclear on enforcement approach
Look, my opinions and commentary stray from ‘journalism’ in the strictest sense pretty often. This is my blog space. I’m the head of publication. It is my prerogative to go on a bit of a rant about things that get under my skin here and there between sending the normal stream of content, happenings, reviews, and so forth.
This is one of those things.
San Jose, like many US jurisdictions are doing, passed another bullshit feel good law that the cops don’t know what to do with. This isn’t the low hanging take of “AlL GuN LawS R INfRingmenTz!” it is the legitimate problem of most of the nonsense ‘do something’ measures that are passed by councils and legislatures in the veneer of violence prevention.
The rules are titled and meant to evoke the feeling of safety and efficacy instead of being effective, or making the community safer, or being written in a way to help law enforcement make them work at all.
The rule in question?
The Gun Harm Reduction Ordinance
This piece of genius requires, requires it demands spuriously, that gun insurance be held and a sin tax of $25 a year to support an ‘unspecified nonprofit’ to support victims of “gun harm” in the community. It demands this from ‘good’ gun owners, obviously. They won’t say the part out loud where the people paying aren’t remotely contributing to the problem enough to matter. The Gun Harm Reduction Ordinance is going to be, somehow, enabling an inspection of gun owners for holding insurance. I’m certain that this will finally get all the violence under control. The public ownership is just under insured and needs to pay a little more money…
What utter crap.
What incognitive bullshit.
What a perfect nothing burger of nonsense to waste police time, resources, and put some extra money in the pockets of an insurance company for no benefit. It’s not like they’re going to be paying out that often. So you just tax and fee a person who probably wasn’t a problem, to generate no payout from the insurance company because they weren’t the problem so no payout, to maybe tap into the charity pile of money, that will be paying their staff with a bunch of that money, who were still not part of the problem.
Brilliant.
I’m certain the as-of-yet unidentified charitable organization will be entirely above board and have consistent oversight by the governing body of San Jose. No reason to worry at all.
Again, how is this supposed to work? Not even ‘reduce crime’ or ‘gun violence in the community’… just… work?
Pay $59.23 a month, and $25 a year to “charity”, for insurance as a responsible gun owner in case the police ask for your proof of insurance and then… what? Does the insurance pay out if your gun gets stolen and used in a crime? Wouldn’t that create another avenue for insurance fraud? What are the criteria for pay out? Does the owner get compensated for the lost firearm and the victim get a payout? Why would this matter if the lawful owner is the one that commits the violent crime? If it does payout if the owner commits a crime, a terrible plan, would we just require all criminals to carry crime insurance? That seems like a swell plan.
Really top notch and well reasoned problem solving here. Insure the criminals against their crimes. Certainly feels like they’re just calling all gun owners, estimated at up to 60% of US adults now, criminals… but I’m sure that’s coincidence for the grounded and well meaning lordship of San Jose.
So back to the original question. How good is a law the cops can’t figure out how to enforce? How good is that law if LEOs are left scratching their heads at how to check insurance paperwork instead of preventative measures the community?
