Los Angeles isn’t exactly a gun-friendly place. Not if you’re not making a movie, anyway. For the film industry, just about anything goes, but for the rest of the residents of the city and county, not so much.
A while back, we noted that LA County was considering some gun control moves.
It was a series of proposals that were in response to the Monterey Park shooting but had absolutely nothing at all to do with said shooting.
Obviously, I was critical of the efforts.
Well, surprising no one, they went and passed them.
The LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a series of gun control measures on Feb. 7 following last month’s mass shooting in Monterey Park, where a gunman killed 11 people and injured nine others.
The package of new and proposed regulations is intended to reduce fatal shootings in LA County, but some of the ordinances will need to go through an additional vetting process before becoming law.
Only two of the ordinances are expected to take effect relatively soon — one would prohibit the sale of .50-caliber handguns (firearms with half-inch-thick bullets) in unincorporated L.A. County — which is just on the other side of Malibu city limits. The other would prohibit carrying firearms on county property, including beaches, parks, and buildings — even with a concealed carry permit (law enforcement excepted).
The board will take a final vote on the motion, authored by Supervisors Janice Hahn and Hilda Solis, in two weeks. The Department of Regional Planning and Treasurer and Tax Collector will finalize the two ordinances and submit them to the board for approval.
“Here we are facing a gun violence epidemic that continues to devastate our communities,” Hahn said at the meeting. “Today, we’re taking steps forward in our fight against gun violence.”
And I promise you, .50 caliber rifles aren’t exactly a part of this so-called epidemic.
Further, law-abiding citizens aren’t the ones you need to worry about carrying on county property. Those folks could carry anywhere and there be nary a problem. What the county supervisors need to worry about are the people who will carry regardless of those laws.
Among the measures still pending is one that would require a buffer zone between gun stores and schools despite there never being an issue because of a gun store’s proximity to a school.
Then again, this is LA County. They’ve never met a gun control law they didn’t like, so it’s unsurprising that they’d look at measures like this.
Let’s be sure to remind them of all this “diligent” effort in a year or so when these laws accomplish absolutely nothing. After all, that’s how this will shake out. We all know it. Everyone with a semi-functioning brain knows it.
Unfortunately, none of those kinds of folks are LA County supervisors, apparently.
Yet let’s also remember that none of this would have prevented Monterey Park. The killer didn’t use a .50 caliber firearm and it wasn’t on county property. Even if it had been, do you think someone so willing to murder would have been intimidated by such a law?
Gun control, however, doesn’t care about reality much of the time. At least, so it seems.