San Jose is moving forward with the latest California gimmick for wiping out the Second Amendment.
This plan involves requiring gun owners to carry “liability insurance”.
Mayor Sam Liccardo claims that guns are responsible for $442 million in costs. Except that those costs are largely inflicted by criminals. And, shockingly enough, gang members doing drive bys are not going to take out liability insurance, nor would any insurance pay out in the event that their holder shoots a 6-month-old baby while fighting over who gets to sell drugs on a street corner.
That makes the pretext for San Jose’s ‘constitutional tax’ farcial and illegal. And it comes after California cities and legislative leaders in particular have continued searching for various gimmicks for eliminating the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Taxes and assorted financial penalties have topped the list.
Ever since the ban on sulfur matches was implemented a century ago using that kind of gimmick, it’s become a mainstay.
But courts have made it pretty clear that you can’t try to eliminate a right by imposing financial penalties for practicing it. Especially if your clear and obvious intent is to prevent people from practicing that right. There’s a big difference between a legitimate effort to ask a group to carry liability insurance and an illegitimate effort to suppress a right through that gimmick.
Of course once an insurance requirement is imposed, it can be made so onerous as to be completely unaffordable.
This is shades of the plan to tax ammunition at a rate that would make it impossible to afford.
“Certainly the Second Amendment protects every citizen’s right to own a gun. It does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right,” San Jose Mayor Liccardo falsely argued.
Taxpayers don’t subsidize that right, unlike Mayor Liccardo’s salary and San Jose’s grab bag of leftist social welfare gimmicks.
Guns actually enable people to defend themselves against the criminals that Liccardo and members of his party have chosen to empower. They’re not a subsidy, like a militia they provide a public service that would otherwise require the services of the police.
What’s the discount from a homeowner putting down a thug breaking into his home over a police shootout with that same thug?
San Jose ought to be paying an actual subsidy to gun owners as a volunteer militia in the spirit of the second amendment.
Leave a Reply