San Jose's delusions about guns and homicides

Beth LaBerge/KQED via AP, Pool

The city of San Jose now requires gun owners to have insurance. They’re stepping up their anti-Second Amendment efforts because they labor under the delusion that lawful gun owners somehow tie into violent crime in some bizarre way.

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And the police department there seems inclined to feed into that delusion as well.

As of Monday night, San Jose has recorded just three homicides in 2022 — a dramatic drop in killings for the Bay Area’s biggest city.

None of the homicides so far this year have involved a gun, which has police believing their efforts to get guns off the streets are paying off.

“We have officers going out there every day, approximately 200 officers across three shifts. If people pay attention to our social media, they’ll see the vast amounts of firearms that are being taken off our city streets,” San Jose Police Sgt. Christian Camarillo said.

Many of the seized weapons are so-called ghost guns, which are homemade guns with no serial numbers. They are nearly impossible to track.

“How do you prevent violent gun crime? By being proactive, by going out there and removing these guns off our streets before they’re able to be used in a crime, in a shooting, in a robbery,” Camarillo said.

Well, isn’t that special?

First, are homicides really down because of gun seizures? That’s kind of impossible to say definitively. After all, San Jose is far from the only city to report a decrease in homicides this year. And we already know that Dallas and Miami saw a decrease last year. None of these are in anti-gun states and passed a requirement for insurance.

Plus, if there are only three homicides this year and none of them involved firearms, why is there such a focus on guns in the city? I mean, gun owners are now required to pay a fee just to legally keep their own property and are required to have insurance, all because guns represent some kind of menace.

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Yet what we’re seeing in San Jose is that guns really aren’t the problem.

Oh, but the police are finding guns left and right, guns that aren’t legal to possess, which means guns are the problem.

Except, those so-called ghost guns? They’re already illegal in California where it’s against the law to possess an unserialized firearm. In other words, those guns violate state law in the first place, so again, why target law-abiding gun owners?

The only answer I can come up with is that San Jose has deluded itself to believe that guns are only in the hands of bad guys. Why else target all guns as if all gun owners are really criminals?

Of course, that still doesn’t explain how they still seem fixated on guns when all of their homicides were committed without them. That’s something the city needs to figure out before people start to realize that all this talk of gun control is really just smoke and mirrors so officials can avoid dealing with the actual problem of violent people.

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