The problem with gun laws, well one of the problems, is that they’re not written by people who understand guns. One example is California’s assault rifle ban that makes buying assault rifles illegal, but allows the purchase of “utility rifles” and the purchase of all of the parts necessary to make them into assault rifles. All legally unless you actually assemble them, another example is San Francisco’s proposed handgun ban.
San Francisco’s ban would be one of the most far reaching, in legal scope in the nation, but like many guns laws it is doomed to be under enforced and when enforced it is doomed to be discriminatorily enforced.
In California it is already illegal to own a handgun if you have nearly any criminal conviction on your record. Simple Battery (which can be defined as a shove), any assault conviction whatsoever, any Domestic Violence conviction, a recent 5150, or a weapons charge of any kind (including knives) just to mention a few. In order to purchase a handgun legally you also need to be able to obtain a handgun safety certificate, as well as pass a safety test when you pick up your gun after the 10-day waiting period.
What is the end result of all of this legislation?
That the vast, vast, majority of people who commit crimes with guns do so with guns that they own illegally under existing legislation.
San Francisco’s Supervisors when placing this ban on the coming 2005 ballot have been explicit that their intent is to lower the crime and homicide rate in the city, specifically to lower it in Bayview/ Hunters Point. An admirable goal, as well as a social obligation which the city is long overdue to take on in a serious way, this ban though, is not the way to go about it.
What will the ban change? Well, as far the law goes, not much. As I mentioned existing law already prohibits the vast majority of people who are apt to commit crimes with guns from owning them legally now. What goes without consideration in this legislation is the progression that violence makes in a persons life, very few people, if any chose to shoot a person as their first crime.
Also in considering Hunters Point you need to take into account the way that the neighborhood is policed, in violent neighborhoods police are apt to make sweeping arrests and quick to throw whoever they can in a squad car. In these situations the victims of police sweeps are often very willing to get cited out on a misdemeanor battery charge instead of fighting the arrest itself in court. The disproportionate arrest and conviction rates for the black community are well documented in many places, and those facts do not need to be rehashed here. The net effect of the sort of discriminatory policing practiced all over the country and here in San Francisco is that the majority of community members in the neighborhoods targeted by this legislation are already prohibited from legally owning a gun.
So what are the effects of making illegal guns more illegal? Well for one those people committing crimes with guns will face more prison time, and more time does not equal lower crime or greater rehabilitation. In fact for more than 30 years now California’s Corrections Department has officially disavowed rehabilitation as policy, now recognizing punishment as their guiding ethos, not an approach that hinders violent tendencies inside or outside of prisons.
Enforcement is another issue overlooked by the authors of this proposed legislation. If the purpose of the legislation is not just to increase jail time for people committing crimes with guns, then it must be to get all of the handguns out of San Francisco. A goal that begs the question, who is going to do that? The legislation, as written, allows handgun owners 90 days from the implementation of the law to turn in their guns to the police without legal repercussion. After the 90 day period passes and the city realizes that they have not collected a fraction of the weapons that are in the city, what are they going to do? Does the SFPD intend to search door to door throughout the city? No one is suggesting this yet and the San Francisco Police Officers Union is not going to support it if it is suggested, but without a door-to-door search there no way to clear the city of handguns.
Existing law, though stringent in many ways does not require weapons owned by private citizens to be registered. There have been claims made by this measures backers that a database exists that includes all handgun owners in the city because of the existence of the handgun safety certificates. Unfortunately these certificates have only been in effect less than 5 years, so any gun purchased legally before that time would not show up in any database. So the only option for fair enforcement of this proposed law would be a door-to-door search. If the city were to take this on as a task I could consider backing the measure; start in the Marina and Pacific Heights where people own $1,500 Kimber’s, confiscate all of those first and I could consider backing the measure. But as any critical thinker can conclude that’s not the way it’s going to play out. If there is any door-to-door attempt it will be in neighborhoods already historically over policed and discriminatorily policed, and the only people who will be affected that are not affected by existing law are those citizens who own guns and have never committed any crime and do not intend to.
The authors of this legislation also do not take into account what guns represent for people in their lives. First and foremost the cost of a weapon cannot be understated, for many people spending the $800-$1,500 that a decent handgun costs represents a huge investment and one they intend to maintain for a lifetime. For a regular working person that cost may represent a week or two worth of wages per gun. Simply making it illegal to hold onto this investment will not be enough to encourage most people to hand them over for nothing.
So without the suggestion of the unprecedented move to have the police conduct a house to house sweep for weapons, what this proposed ban will mean in real life terms is simply more prison time for people already caught up in the racist criminal justice system. More families torn apart if members are prosecuted for ownership alone and more legal cover for police intrusion into private homes (similar to the sweeps made in Hunters Point after Officer Espinoza was shot earlier this year). What it will not mean is that violence will decline, homicide will decline or burglary will decline. For good examples of bad situations look at Chicago and D.C. both of which have handgun bans, and both of which have higher murder rates than San Francisco has without one. In D.C.’s case the murder rate even went up several years after the ban went into effect.
Though this legislation is fated to disserve the community, its intention is sound, and the homicide rate in the Bayview /Hunter Point area does need to come down before the entire community is torn apart. But rather than spending time crafting legislation making gun ownership illegal, why not address the reasons that people commit crimes with guns in the first place. Why not deal with the unemployment rate that is regularly more than twice the citywide rate? Why not deal with the fact that more than 40% of the households in Hunters Point have annual incomes below $15,000, and realize that any person facing such a dire economic outlook is going to be inclined to commit crime in order to get by, whether or not the tool he uses for the crime is legal.
In order to lower the crime and homicide rate we need jobs programs, adequate housing, improved education, a police department less corrupt than the one we have now, improved education and lower incarceration. What we do not need are more punitive laws that address the symptoms of social problems without addressing the problems themselves.
