The city of Oakland made some interesting headlines in the gun world recently. They advised citizens to keep an air horn handy, ready to blast if they’re attacked.
It’s a stupid suggestion. We all know it and we know why, especially in a city like Oakland where, frankly, most people aren’t necessarily going to trip over themselves to help their neighbors.
But the air horn suggestion is an important point, one that I suspect most in California aren’t going to recognize.
As David Cordea writes over at Ammoland, it’s an admission.
This is what Oakland’s “law-abiding citizens” have to rely on when their lives and property are being threatened by a protected class of urban predator. Blow an air horn and the police might show up in an hour. Meanwhile, if they ever do catch the perp, he’ll be back on the streets in time to claim new victims thanks to plea deals and complaints about “overrepresentation” (and cops had better not get rough with him if they don’t want to be fired and prosecuted, and maybe even blamed for the city being burned).
Still, it’s tough to feel sorry for people who consistently vote 80% Democrat. True, “progressive” government fails because that’s what it does, but ultimately, it would be powerless if citizenship malpractice wasn’t the rule in urban areas.
They’ve got the communist-sympathizing government they voted for. Unfortunately, wherever they enjoy a tyranny of the majority, so do the rest of us who perceive manipulators counting on the lawlessness getting worse, and demands for government to do something, anything to stop it getting louder.
Tough words, but he’s not exactly wrong.
Oakland and the rest of California have long treated guns as if they were the problem, that if they just passed a few more laws, all their issues would go away.
Except, that’s not what happened. Oakland is a rough place to live and work, and telling people to blast an air horn and hoping that someone will call the police–which will probably get there just in time to draw a chalk outline of the person’s body and put a little card next to the air horn–is an admission that all of those efforts have done nothing.
Gun control doesn’t work. It has never worked, but Oakland has fully embraced it as the answer to their issues, and when that failed, they told people to get air horns.
Of course, when those air horns fail to save lives, Oakland officials won’t admit it was a stupid suggestion or that gun control doesn’t work. They’ll go back to their old standby of blaming the guns.
Yet they’re also offering a tacit admission that no, gun control doesn’t work. If it did, no one would need an air horn as some idiotic personal defense tool.
Granted, no one does need one. What they need is a concealable handgun and training in how to use it effectively in a self-defense situation.
It’s only too bad that there’s absolutely no chance of Oakland officials acknowledging that fact. If they did, they’d have to stop pretending guns are, as Kathy Bates put it in The Waterboy, “The debil!”
They’d much rather people die than admit they’re wrong. They’d rather see their city ripped apart by criminals than actually do anything that might actually work, such as advising people to get their California carry permits and use them.
Air horns won’t fix that.
Yet, as Codrea notes, they voted for this. They’ve voted for this over and over again, so it’s kind of on them. Still, we can hope they wake up and recognize that gun control hasn’t done them any favors.
