Missoula City Council Ups Anti-Gun Rep With New Gun Restrictions

The city council in Missoula, Montana doesn’t seem to like guns. That’s odd, too, because Montana seems like the last place in the world you’d find a whole lot of anti-gun politicians, but then again, this is the state that gave us John Tester, so looks can be deceiving I suppose. It seems like the city council in Missoula, though, doesn’t even want to pretend to like guns these days.

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It has decided to issue a couple of gun bans recently.

The city council in Missoula, Montana, passed two gun bans Monday night, one of which became effective immediately.

The Associated Press reports that the ban which took immediate effect was an “emergency ordinance” to “[prohibit] members of the public from bringing firearms into any building where the City Council meets or to public assemblies, public museums, the public library, [and] certain public parks under the city’s jurisdiction.”

The ban also covers “any other locations of public assembly where persons gather together to conduct and/or administer any public election while election-related activities are taking place.”

The second ordinance is a non-emergency version of the first which goes into effect in 30 days.

Of course, Moms Demand Action had someone on hand to utter absolute nonsense.

KGVO reports that pastor and Moms Demand Action volunteer Jean Larson spoke to the council in support of the ban, claiming “95 people a day are killed by guns in our country. We have a need to be safe and a right to be safe from this public health emergency.”

By now, we all know that the number of gun deaths is overinflated due to their proclivity to include suicides in those numbers. Because suicidal people think, “Well, crap. I don’t have a gun to shoot myself, so I guess I’ll just live instead.”

Pathetic.

As for the new rule in Missoula, it seems that while Montana does have a preemption law, there are some exceptions. Basically, local governments “may prohibit carrying of concealed or openly carried weapons to a public assembly, publicly owned building, park under its jurisdiction, or school,” according to Frontier Carry.

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That certainly seems to fit with what Missoula did, and probably explains why it didn’t go further. After all, I think we all know that they wanted to.

In the end, though, the council accomplished nothing. As gun rights activists have said since the dawn of this debate, if someone wants to hurt someone with a firearm, there’s no way a law is going to stop them from doing so. All they’ve done is made it so that law-abiding citizens have to decide whether they want to be safe or follow the law.

Those who intend on breaking the law anyway? They won’t have a moment’s hesitation. They’ll walk right into those buildings and do whatever the hell they want to do.

The Missoula City Council has accomplished absolutely nothing except maybe telling the rest of the state how idiotic they are.

Somehow, I suspect the rest of the state already knew it.

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