San Franciscans to Vote on Handgun Ban
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Without public debate or action by the body as a whole, five members of the San Francisco, CA, Board of Supervisors have placed a proposed handgun ban in the city and county of San Francisco on the November 2005 ballot.
If passed, gunowners would have 90 days to surrender their handguns to the San Francisco police or sheriff’s department.
Under the proposed law, only police and security officers, members of the military and other persons “employed and engaged in protecting and preserving property or life within the scope of his or her employment” would be allowed to have handguns. It would also be illegal to manufacture, sell or distribute handguns inside the city.
However, non-residents would not be subject to the law if they happen to be inside the city temporarily. If passed, the measure would only affect one business, High Bridge Arms, apparently the only gun shop within the city limits.
The measure was placed on the ballot by five members of the Board of Supervisors, as no other action was necessary under the law, which requires a minimum of four sponsors. It was submitted directly to the Department of Elections by Supervisors Chris Daly, Bevan Dufty, Tom Ammiano, Matt Gonzales and Michela Alioto-Pier.
The announcement drew a quick reaction from Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and Tom Boyer, spokesman for the San Francisco Chapter of the Pink Pistols, a national gay gun rights organization. Gottlieb recalled to Gun Week that SAF successfully fought a handgun ban passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1982 by taking the city to court. At the time, anti-gun Sen. Dianne Feinstein was mayor.
“This issue was decided by the California courts more than 22 years ago, and the gun ban extremists lost,” Gottlieb said. “Why some city supervisors want to waste the time and money of voters to revisit an issue that was unanimously trounced by the state Court of Appeals makes no sense. Even if the ban were to pass, it will not hold up in court.”
The San Francisco case happened in the same year that California voters rejected Proposition 15, a statewide measure to ban handguns.
Boyer suggested that backers of the measure not only dislike guns, they are also “looking for headlines.” Gottlieb suggested the new ban proposal has a more insidious nature, the practice of social bigotry against gunowners.
“It is incredible,” Gottlieb added, “that in a city where the government has supposedly taken a lead in defending individual rights and freedoms, it is still considered acceptable to practice social bigotry, so long as gunowners are the victims.”
Boyer, who vowed to make a major issue out of the handgun ban proposal, noted, “It grieves me that our Board of Supervisors would sacrifice the basic human right of self defense, depriving those who are the least physically able to defend themselves, for political gain.”
He likened disarming people to opening up a baby seal hunt.
Ironically, proponents of the ban seem to be taking the gay vote for granted because of an incident that led to the first attempt by the city to ban handguns.
In late June 1982, Feinstein pushed through a handgun ban in San Francisco that lasted only three months before it was overturned by the California Court of Appeals. Feinstein, who became mayor after the murders of Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, made quite a show of turning in her own handgun to the police chief.
But 20 days after the ban was enacted, on June 29, SAF filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the ban. That case was fast-tracked, and on Oct. 30, the California Court of Appeals overturned the ban. An appeal of that unanimous ruling by Feinstein was unsuccessful, as the California Supreme Court declined to hear the case, allowing the appeals court ruling to stand.
Gottlieb adamantly stated that a handgun ban, whether imposed by “government fiat” or an election, still has no legal teeth in California because of the state pre-emption law.
“This may come as a shock to the moral inquisitors in San Francisco,” Gottlieb said, “but gunowners have civil rights, too, just like any other social group. Those civil rights are not up for grabs at the whims of the Board of Supervisors, or even the popular vote. We fought this battle once, and we’re not afraid to fight it again.”
Within hours after news broke about the proposed ballot measure, SAF was in contact with the Pink Pistols, Gottlieb said.
Boyer identified the city supervisors supporting the ban in an e-mail to activists, and immediately began circulating the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of all five to Pink Pistols members and supporters.
If the measure is approved, it would take effect in January 2006, barring any legal action, which is virtually certain.
Critics are already calling the measure more symbolism than substance, because there may be no way to enforce it. Since there is no handgun registry, there will be no way of knowing who has a handgun. Even if there were, a spokesman for the campaign has publicly acknowledged that many handguns used in crimes are stolen from people who had bought them legally.
One observer, constitutional law expert Don B. Kates, an attorney who represented SAF in its 1982 lawsuit, also said the proposed ordinance has a loophole that will allow the city’s elite to continue packing handguns.
Noting that California concealed pistol licenses are good statewide, and will supercede the ordinance once they are issued, Kates told Gun Week in an e-mail, “Thus any city resident to whom the police chief issues a CCW is entitled by supervening state law to carry a handgun anywhere in the sate, whether in or out of San Francisco. Putting the CCW license statute together with the proposed handgun ban makes it a local handgun permit law, i.e., a law which makes possessing a handgun dependent on having a permit.”
According to The San Francisco Chronicle, 67% of firearms used in crimes that caused injury or death in 1999—the most recent year for which figures are available—were handguns.
Alioto-Pier told The Chronicle that her motivation is to keep guns out of the hands of children. She insisted that the ban was not an attempt to take away anyone’s constitutional rights.
However, Chuck Michel, an attorney and spokesman for the California Rifle and Pistol Association, told reporters that guns are “being made the scapegoat for policy failures of the city.” He said CRPA was preparing to seek an injunction to keep the measure off the ballot.
One incoming supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, told a newspaper that he supports the proposal, and will either sell or donate his handguns. He claimed that “the Second Amendment is absolutely archaic.”
The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) noted in a Dec. 17 Grassroots Alert that according to Bill Barnes, an aide to Supervisor Daly, “The hope is . . . that officers will have an opportunity to interact with folks and if they have a handgun, that will be reason enough to confiscate it.”
The NRA-ILA alert also noted the irony in San Francisco politicians’ attempt to rid their city and county of all handguns and ammunition in a manner similar to Washington, DC, where a gun ban has produced one of the highest rates of violent crime in America.
“According to the anti-gunners’ logic,” NRA-ILA noted, “If gun bans worked, Washington, DC, would be one of the safest cities in America. In reality, the District holds the notorious distinction of being the murder capital of the United States.”
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