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Guns Don’t Kill People – Misguided Ideology Kills People

In a willfully ignorant move to rid their streets of dangerous guns, the mayor of San Francisco sponsored “Guns for Gifts” program where people turn in guns for $100 and $200 dollar gift cards. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

No photo identification is required to participate. The firearms must be unloaded, operable and delivered in a clear, plastic bag that is put into another container, such as a duffel bag. Ammunition should be delivered in a plastic bag separate from the firearm. People driving to the event should transport their firearms in the trunk.

The Associated Press reports that the “[t]he idea is to make the streets seem a little safer when the city's murder rate has risen in recent years – San Francisco has had at least 89 homicides so far this year.”

This silly program is flawed on so many levels and is motivated by a far Left anti-gun ideology, not a desire to lower the rate of the city’s homicides.

Law-abiding, responsible gun owners pose little threat to innocent bystanders. They pose great risk, however, to the criminal elements that prey on innocent people who cannot defend themselves. And law-abiding people who turn in their guns cannot protect themselves from the people out there who – surprise, surprise – won’t turn in their semi-automatic guns.

San Francisco is virulently anti-gun. City officials and crazy voters tried to ban handguns in the city – Second Amendment be darned – but a state judge struck down the law. The goal of programs like this is to get guns out of our hands, and do little to curb the bad guys from obtaining guns. Do you think gang members go to K-Mart to buy their guns? Hardly.

 “Guns for Gifts” only proves that people who pose no reasonable risk are the ones the city is putting at risk. Here are two examples from that AP report:

A man carrying a semiautomatic handgun approached a group of San Francisco police officers Saturday afternoon and, with a smile, handed over the pistol in exchange for $150 in gift cards.

"I used to fire it at bottles or do some plinking in the woods," said the gun's owner, 48-year-old Bruce Bourne.

***

Peter Buxtun, a 70-year-old gun advocate, turned in two pistols Saturday that he said were worthless. He collected $300 in gift cards.

"You can buy junk guns for $10 and then use the gift cards to buy new guns," he said. "I saw a half-dozen uniformed SF police officers taken off the street to sit for hours in a City Hall photo-op, instead of patrolling certain drug-ridden and gang-infested neighborhoods."

Predictably, the article does not cite any gangbanger who, out of the goodness of his heart, turned in his sawed off shotgun or semi-automatic. You see, the $200 gift card isn’t worth the money when they can use that gun to kill his enemies and rob innocent bystanders. But advocates of this program argue that the bad guys get the majority of guns by stealing them from homes of law-abiding gun owners. The San Francisco Chronicle makes that claim, but offers no specific source, in an editorial posing as a news story. (By the way, it should be mentioned that notorious gang MS13’s weapon of choice, particularly in Virginia, is machetes – perhaps that state could start a “Machetes for Gifts” program?)

The article quotes San Francisco police Sgt. Mikail Ali, who defends the program:

"The bottom line here is that when we do this, you get a gun off the street, out of someone's home, for good, where it can no longer do anyone any harm," Ali said. "And until this country deals with the obvious issues of the production and proliferation of weapons in the United States, we just have to keep doing this our own way."

Of course, his reasoning is flawed – you’re getting a gun out of the home of someone who could have used it to defend himself against a burglar with a gun. But once you read Ali’s last comment about the “obvious issues,” it’s clear he’s a typical San Francisco ideologue who puts his politics above the safety of the people he is supposed to serve. Unfortunately, the article does a lot of the half-truths and propagandizing that he didn’t get to do.

Anti-gun liberals love to point to Britain to show how wonderful life is sans guns. The San Francisco Chronicle reports, “According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, there were 29,569 gun-related deaths in the United States in 2004. By contrast, the 2004 tally in Great Britain was 169.”

Sounds dandy! But let’s dive a little bit more into the numbers, shall we? According to the Guardian Unlimited, while there has been a decline on traditional armed robbery, it has been accompanied by a “46% rise in the use of firearms in residential robberies.” The article then states [that] “766 people were murdered in 2005-06” and “The total number of armed robberies rose by 10% to 4,120 from 3,674 over the last 12 months.” These are suspicious tidbits to leave out of the Chronicle article, aren’t they?

And there are more statistics that simply don’t support the Chronicle’s lame attempt to push an anti-gun agenda at the expense of facts in what should be a fair and balanced article. Switzerland, for example, is a country full of gun-yielding citizens and they have extremely low homicide rate. And, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis, “In 1996 Australia enacted sweeping gun control laws. In the six years following, violent crime rates rose by 32 percent.” Bans also did little to curb violence in Chicago and D.C. – in fact, it had an opposite effect. According to the Opinion Journal, “In the five years after the [DC] ban took effect in 1976, the murder rate rose to 35 per 100,000 people from 27. In fact, in the three decades since the ban took effect, the annual murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in 1976. In 2002 the murder rate hit 46 per 100,000 people. Robbery rates have also risen dramatically.”

The Chronicle and “Guns for Gifts” advocates don’t mention those stats, do they? They also don’t say anything about the ways the program can be abused.

This program could give an easy way for the criminal element to get rid of a gun that was used for a murder or other crime. The program doesn’t require any identification when turning in a gun; the people are not questioned – it’s much like the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, only this one San Francisco supports. The authorities simply check to see if the gun is stolen – if it is, it is returned (how ironic).

But facts and the reality of these programs be darned – this is about ideologues looking to boost their resumes with useless programs that offer nifty photo ops for the papers. Gun bans – and any government action to get guns from law-abiding citizens – are dangerous and ultimately lead to more harm than good.

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