San Diego Votes to Jail Home Owners Who Don’t Lock Up Their Guns

Recently, the San Diego city council dealt a troubling blow to gun owners in the city by voting in favor of a radical new city ordinance that will almost certainly turn thousands of law-abiding gun owners into criminals.

Under this new ordinance, gun owners in San Diego will be required to either keep their firearms in a Department of Justice approved lockbox or secure them with trigger locks at all times. If a firearm owned by someone in the city is not stored in this manner, the owner will face criminal charges and penalties that include jail time.

The idiocy of this moronic new ordinance is almost too staggering to comprehend. Let’s start by considering the fact that this ordinance will do absolutely nothing to lower violent crime in the city. It’s fair to say that this ordinance will not save so much as one single person from being murdered via a firearm. In fact, it stands to increase the violent crime in the city – a fact that we will take a closer look at later.

Not a single criminal in San Diego is going to be deterred by this ordinance. Not one. Anyone who plans to use a gun in a robbery or a murder isn’t even going to be slowed down a by a law that says they must keep their firearms in a lockbox. Those who commit violent crimes with a firearm certainly aren’t worried about disobeying a city ordinance.

The ordinance may or may not prevent some accidental firearm deaths and suicides, but even this is doubtful. The fact still remains that if someone wants to access their firearm, a city ordinance isn’t going to stop them.

What this city ordinance will do, though, is strip San Diego gun owners from their means of self-defense. The vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens, and they will follow the laws that are passed.

While innocent, law-abiding gun owners are forced to lock their guns away in a location that cannot be quickly accessed in the event of an emergency, criminals who ignore the law will continue to use their firearms in any way they please – including attacking the law-abiding citizens that the city of San Diego has made defenseless.

If there’s one silver lining to this absurd new ordinance, it’s the fact that it is going to be almost impossible to enforce. As of yet, the city of San Diego hasn’t abandoned the Constitution entirely, and San Diego police officers will still need probable cause and a warrant to search a person’s home. There will be no way for them to know whether or not a person is keeping their firearm in a lockbox, meaning that San Diego gun owners can choose to ignore the law without too much risk.

However, the risk is still there, and there will undoubtedly be those who are caught and arrested for the crime of defending their homes and their families. The ordinance may be almost impossible to enforce, but there will be those who are turned into the police or caught due to some other stroke of poor luck.

Arrests due to this ordinance may be few and far between, but there will be arrests if the ordinance is signed into law. Some otherwise law-abiding gun owners will go to jail, other law-abiding gun owners will live with the risk of jailtime on their mind, and others will be forced to abandon their means of home defense.

This city ordinance is one of the most blatant and dangerous violations of the Second Amendment that has ever passed in our country. Being forced to keep your firearms locked away at all times under penalty of the law is almost no better than not being allowed to own firearms at all.

Right now, the ordinance is not yet law, and the San Diego city council must vote on the ordinance once more before it is passed into law. For the sake of San Diego gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment across the country, one can only hope that these delusional city council members come to their senses before the second vote is held.