San Jose’s city council passed a measure last month requiring gun owners to pay a $25 “harm reduction” fee and liability insurance or relinquish their firearms to the government, making the city the first in the nation to impose an annual fee on law-abiding, firearm owning citizens.
The city’s Democrat mayor, Sam Liccardo insists the new ordinance, allowing law enforcement officials to seize firearms from those who refuse to pay the fees, will ultimately reduce crime and establish “a new kind of framework for gun safety, Slate reports.
Allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those who refuse to pay the fee makes will ultimately reduce crime, the Liccardo told the publication.
“For example, there’s a bar brawl and they’re patting down everybody and someone’s got a gun. ‘Have you paid your fee? You have insurance?’ ‘No.’ OK, well, there’s an opportunity for us to remove the gun. And then when the gun owner comes back and demonstrates that they comply with the law and they’re a lawful gun owner, they get their gun back. But in the meantime, you’ve taken a gun out of a bar brawl. And that’s not a bad thing,” he argued.
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The fees paid by firearm owners will be allocated to “experts” who “understand domestic violence prevention programs, suicide prevention” to create a non-profit that will assist lawmakers with developing firearm “safety,” Liccardo explained.
“We’re forming a 501(c)(3) foundation, which is going to receive the dollars, and the board, which will be comprised of a host of folks, including, for example, Stanford professors, an epidemiologist who has been focused on gun harm, and nonprofit experts who understand domestic violence prevention programs, suicide prevention,” he said. “We’ve invited and at least one member of a gun group has actually joined this effort to create this nonprofit, because we want organizations representing gun owners to be at the table, helping us to understand, how do we best communicate, how do we best invest? “
While the Second Amendment states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” the San Jose lawmaker contends the burdensome new liability insurance is constitutional:
“I don’t blame anyone for being emotional about this,” he said. “These are really important issues that go to the core of what we believe about freedoms and rights and our own safety. But I’d say this. First, it’s a fee, it’s not a tax, and I won’t go into the details about what the difference is, but the reality is that in this country, there have been taxes on guns and ammunition since at least 1919, and they’ve been upheld by the courts. So the fact that there’s a constitutional right attached somewhere to the exercise of a particular activity doesn’t mean it can’t be regulated, taxed, or have a fee imposed.
While the fee is not a tax, Liccardo argues, Americans should be taxed to practice exercise their Second Amendment rights, .
“We all agree the Second Amendment protects the right for all of us to own or possess a gun,” he said, “but it doesn’t require taxpayers to subsidize that right. And when people become aware of the fact that, hey, whether you own a gun or not, you’re actually paying for this, it starts to get folks thinking about, well, how could we better distribute the costs of gun ownership and gun harm?
“So the fact that there’s a constitutional right attached somewhere to the exercise of a particular activity doesn’t mean it can’t be regulated, taxed, or have a fee imposed. Newspapers pay taxes, even though that’s an important First Amendment right. For the litigants who filed a lawsuit against us who were exercising their Seventh Amendment rights, they paid a filing fee at the courthouse.”
The National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit against the city over its new firearm policy.
Not only is the law an unconstitutional abridgment of the Second Amendment, but it infringes on the First Amendment by requiring firearm owners to fund a yet-to-exist non-profit that could promote initiatives they opposed, Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney representing the plaintiffs contends.
The law compels people to purchase insurance that doesn’t necessarily exist and that demonstrates that this law is not a good faith attempt to do anything other than ban or burden the lawful possession of guns,” the lawsuit states. “The Ordinance even prohibits the city from directing how the non-profit would use the funds. The one thing that is clear is that the organization will likely be dedicated to exclusively preaching the negative risks of gun ownership.”