Good news, of a sort.
An initiative that San Francisco voters approved last November banning residents from owning handguns violated state law, a Superior Court judge ruled today.
Proposition H, which won a 58 percent majority, would have outlawed possession of handguns by all city residents except law enforcement officers and others who needed the guns for professional purposes. It also would have forbidden the manufacture, sale and distribution of all guns and ammunition in San Francisco.
The National Rifle Association sued on behalf of gun owners, advocates and dealers the day after the measure passed. The NRA argued that Prop. H overstepped local government authority and intruded into an area regulated by the state. The city agreed to delay enforcement of the measure while the suit was pending.
In today’s ruling, Judge James Warren said California law, which authorizes police agencies to issue handgun permits, implicitly prohibits a city or county from banning handgun possession by law-abiding adults.
My “of a sort” line is because, later in the article, you will find that the same bozos who sponsored Prop H are planning on trying again, this time focusing strictly on official residents of San Francisco.
Are you from Sacramento or L.A? You’d be OK in SF.
But that probably also means illegal aliens, since they aren’t official residents, would be OK as well.
In other crazy California news, the guy who was hand picked by King County Executive, Ron “Tax to the Max” Sims, to run the King County Elections department, and also handed Barely Governor Christine Gregiore her win via illegal and ‘suddently found’ votes during the final legally available recount is heading to Los Angeles!
Dean Logan, the politically battle-weary director of King County elections, is resigning to take the No. 2 elections job in Los Angeles, prompting County Executive Ron Sims to delay moving the county to a virtually all-mail voting system.
In an interview Monday, Logan said a factor in his decision to leave his job as director of the Records, Elections and Licensing Services Division was the “toxic environment” surrounding the elections operation. It heated up after the contested 2004 governor’s election and intensified again recently over Sims’ vote-by-mail plan.
I’ll be expecting LA County’s next election to be so screwed up that it’ll take them weeks to figure out who the next Governor of California is. The guy is a walking disaster.
Have fun!
In a way, it’s a catch-22. It would be nice, given the current composition of the Supreme Court, to have a “perfect” gun-control test case start wending its way up the appellate line so the Supremes could issue a definitive ruling on whether or not the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. San Francisco’s handgun ban would have been a pretty good test case — except that it was so poorly drafted that it was certainly going to be thrown out on other grounds, as it was here. In fact, it would be tough to get the SF Board of Supervisors to approve a gun-ban ordinance that was narrowly tailored to serve in a proper Supreme Court test case, precisely because they’re such a bunch of lefty power-mad clowns that they will always go for more sweeping, idealistic pronunciamentos than for realistic, practical measures.
Power mad clowns – yes! The retro-beatnick ultra sophisticated citizenry and Old-Socialist-Guard of SF are some of the most naive, deluded, and arrogant pseudohipsters on the planet.
The reality is they are so fractionalized by lock-step Diversity that only a chaotic amalgam of weak and porous political coalitions exist internally, (and makes Palestine look like a shining example of Solidarity).
The Supervisors evidently take their label literally, and hold the conviction that, (1.) they’re always right (Left) about everything, (2.) by a vote they can overrule and affect the outcome of Physics (it works with old acid-heads?), (3.) Being superior to the benighted suburban-masses surrounding them in their island fantasy-kingdom they are a Supreme Law unto themselves. They don’t call it Baghdad-by-the-Bay for nuthin’.
Au contraire, mon friere, I suspect that no matter how many votes Arnold gets in the next election it won’t be enough to win with this sack of pus doing the counting…
I could write that ordinance, David….
“Be it resolved that in the City of San Francisco, the right of a person serving in a well-regulated militia to possess militia-related arms shall not be infringed.”
“Be it also resolved that individual Residents of the City of San Francisco NOT serving in a well-regulated militia have no right to possess arms.”
“Be it resolved and understood that the City of San Francisco recognizes the several State-certified policing agencies, the California National Guard and such State-certifiable law and/or order agencies as may reasonably petition the Supervisors for inclusion within the definition of “militia”, as “Militia”
See, I am an excellent Devil’s Advocate. Your move, sir.