San Jose is about to pass a law requiring every gun owner to pay an annual fee and obtain liability insurance that would cover damage caused by his weapon.
The mayor of San Jose estimates that residents incur about $442 million in gun-related costs each year. Which is a crazy figure (more than $1 million per day), but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
The fees — which would generate at most about $1.4 million per year — will be funneled into ‘evidence-based initiatives to reduce gun violence and gun harm.’
Now, that’s pretty funny because all the available evidence suggests that the best way to reduce gun violence is to encourage more people to have guns.
But while we’re on the subject of evidence, the evidence demonstrates convincingly that every crime is committed by someone whose parents had a child. So if San Jose residents really do incur $442 million in gun-related costs each year, that figure is necessarily dwarfed by child-related costs.
Therefore, it only makes sense that, to help reduce crime of all kinds, San Jose should discourage people from having children by requiring parents to pay an annual fee and obtain liability insurance that would cover damage caused by their children — even after the children grow up and move away. In fact, they should have to get liability insurance that would cover damage caused by all their descendants — grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.
The mayor of San Jose put it this way: ‘Certainly, the Second Amendment protects every citizen’s right to own a gun. It does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right.’
It’s a non-sequitur in that subsidizing gun ownership would mean giving people money to buy guns. Probably by ‘subsidize,’ the mayor means ‘pay for unfortunate consequences of’.
But in any case, let’s apply his logic to having children: ‘It is every citizen’s right to have a child. This does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right.’
And why stop there? Let’s apply it to receiving medical care, or getting an education, or having a retirement income, or any other entitlement that liberals like to call a ‘right’: According to what we might call the San Jose Doctrine, just because you have a right does not require taxpayers to subsidize that right.
Goodbye Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, Social Security, government-guaranteed college loans, and so on.
Goodbye welfare. Hello, personal responsibility.
People who think San Jose is on the right track might want to look a little farther down that track before boarding that train.
