Leave your gun unsecured in your car? Straight to gulag!
Mayor Van Johnson of Savannah, Georgia is sick of gun violence in his city, so he’s going after what he views as one source of the problem: people who have their firearms stolen from their car. If that sounds off to you, you’re not alone. But Mayor Johnson argues it’s a big source for “illegal firearms” which fuel violence in Savannah and elsewhere in the state.
Learn how police held an innocent family in a Dodge Charger at gunpoint here.
As detailed out in a report from local newspaper Savannah Now, the mayor plans to introduce an ordinance that penalizes gun owners if they don’t secure them inside their vehicle and those firearms are subsequently stolen.
In addition, gun owners who do fall victim to theft will be required to report it to the government within 24 hours. We’re not sure if the same thing applies when losing all your firearms in a boating accident.
Before you start thinking this is just heavy-handed governance proposed by a mayor who’s trying to deflect any personal responsibility for ballooning violent crime rates, consider this. The Savannah Police Department says that of the 176 guns stolen from cars in the city from January 1 to September 2, 82% were inside vehicles that were left with the doors unlocked.
Perhaps we’re paranoid from covering stolen car news all over the world, but we lock our car doors even when it’s sitting inside a locked garage. And we know quite a few gun owners who if they’re going into a place where they can’t carry, like a courthouse, they either leave their firearm at home or lock it in the glovebox or a safe hidden somewhere in the interior.
Apparently, a lot of people in Savannah just don’t lock their car doors. We’ve seen police in other cities hang reminders to lock car doors on the rearview mirror of vehicles. They go around and check car doors like criminals do, instead they don’t take anything but rather lock the car for the owner. Why not start with that instead of trying to prosecute the victims of theft?
After all, would a city go after the owner of a Kia that was stolen, then involved in a fatal accident? Would the car doors being locked absolve that Kia owner of supposed legal guilt for the fatality?
We know of at least one automotive site that has, shall we say more authoritarian leanings, and is a huge fan of this proposal. What do you think?
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