SF Housing Authority settles gun lawsuit (prohibited guns, ammo), never intended to enforce...

[The Straight Story]

SAN FRANCISCO
Housing Authority settles gun lawsuit

In papers filed Monday with a federal judge, the Housing Authority agreed not to enforce a provision it added to tenant leases in 2005 prohibiting the possession of guns and ammunition. The ban will now apply only to illegal gun ownership, like possession of a machine gun or possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

The National Rifle Association filed the suit on behalf of an unidentified San Francisco tenant a day after the Supreme Court's June 2008 ruling that declared the Constitution's Second Amendment gave Americans the right to possess guns for self-defense. It was one of a number of suits filed by gun advocates against local firearms restrictions around the nation after the court struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban.

Tim Larsen, a lawyer for the Housing Authority, said Tuesday that the agency never intended to enforce its 2005 ban against law-abiding gun owners and has never done so, even though the lease provision covered legal as well as illegal weapons.

"Our intention was to go after people who were engaged in criminal activity," Larsen said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/13/BALM15A1SG.DTL

[spin]

1. Excellent...

No reason for San Fransisco to treat honest people like second class citizens merely because they live in government housing.

If San Fransisco just wanted to target criminals with firearms, then why bother to write the law at all? Plenty of laws exist to take away firearms from felons.

Somehow this law smells of racism. (But then, that's often been the intention of gun control laws.)

In much the same way, gun control has historically been a tool of racism, and associated with racist attitudes about black violence. Similarly, many gun control laws impinge on that most fundamental of rights: self-defense. Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should regard gun control aimed at law-abiding people as a "suspect idea," and require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.
http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html