While proponents like to call them “safe storage” laws, the truth is that “mandatory storage” fits them much better. After all, locking up guns isn’t necessarily safer for everyone. There are plenty of instances where a locked gun may be inaccessible, thus making it useless to defend someone’s life.

Does that sound “safe” to you?

Regardless, the city of Davis, California just passed a mandatory storage law in the name of public safety.

Davis is doubling down on gun safety after passing an ordinance this week mandating all firearm owners lock their guns away in their vehicles and at home.

“It’s a good idea,” said Sarah Liens, a local parent who welcomes the city’s newest law. “It’s a fairly safe town to raise kids. Keep the guns locked in your house and your car.”

Mayor Lucas Frerichs said that the ordinance came about following recent shootings across the country and a sense that action needed to be taken locally.

“The safe storage for firearms ordinance came up over the course of the last month,” he said.

Passed by the city council, the ordinance requires all firearms in Davis to be locked away in homes and vehicles.

“If the firearm is not locked, they must have it in their own proximity or control,” Frerichs said.

Davis police say they’ve struggled with stolen firearms. In the last three years, officers have recovered seven guns in stolen from vehicles and more than 20 guns stolen from homes.

Now, if this were a town of a few thousand people, then maybe Davis police would have a point. However, the city reportedly has over 66,000 residents.

And you’re telling me that during that time, they’ve recovered fewer than 30 stolen firearms?

That’s less than 10 per year. As such, that doesn’t sound like a pressing issue. It’s a non-problem that they’re now turning into a criminal issue where law-abiding citizens are more likely to be punished than criminals.

Brilliant.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about this mandatory storage law. While I respect there’s a carve-out for if the gun is in your possession or close proximity–about the only time you shouldn’t have your weapon secured even without a mandatory storage law–there’s still something very wrong about telling someone they have to secure their weapons in a particular way.

Especially when it seems there’s really not much of an issue with stolen firearms anyway.

Then there’s the aspect of Bruen. Can a case be made that mandatory storage laws are in keeping with the Second Amendment, particularly the “text and history” standard from Bruen?

I honestly don’t see how. Gun safes and gun locks weren’t a thing in the 18th century, after all, but that exception doesn’t exist in the text of Bruen.

At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is another town trying to make a splash and virtue signal to their liberal residents on the backs of law-abiding gun owners rather than actually try and take steps to really reduce crime in and around their city.