San Francisco rearview

The prospect of leaving San Francisco in a year or so has been filling me with some premature nostalgia. But no more. Just under 60% of San Franciscan voters have chosen to make handgun ownership illegal. Because of course, all criminals in the city, with nothing but the best intentions for society in their hearts, will turn in all their weapons and stop attacking people. Just like a few other misguided parts of the country, we're now a Mandatory Victim Zone. How I loathe people who'll happily ignore the upcoming preventable rapes, beatings, larcenies and murders in order to cling to their utopianist fantasies. Doesn't anyone remember the first country to do this, and the results of its doing so? I'll give you a hint, if it hadn't successfully disarmed its citizens (earning its leader Time Magazine's "Man of the Year Award", by the way), six million Jews wouldn't have gone on state-sponsored train-rides to their deaths.

And to top it off, a "symbolic" proposal that military recruiters not be allowed to contact children at public schools. It would be bad enough that the people here don't realize what value military recruiting serves now that we've got an all-volunteer military. Without this outreach & salemanship from our military's recruiters, all you'd have in the armed forces would be those forced into it by poor economic prospects, which is not at all what a modern military needs, much less what a bountiful state requires if it is to have the Cincinnati it needs (as in Cincinnatus, not the city). That would be bad enough, especially from folks so misguided as to think that forcibly removing the tools people need to defend themselves will keep them safe. But consider, it's more cinical than that. It's a "symbolic" regulation because it won't be enforced. It's completely acknowledged that enforcing this regulation would cause San Francisco schools to lose a chunk of federal funding, and so, even though it has been voted into law, its own proponents don't want it enforced. That's right, the people have spoken, and expressed their misguided will, and as a result, that decision will be ignored by politicians afraid to be criticised for the consequences of doing their jobs. The city that asks its citizens ("subjects" might be a more apt term) to trust the government to enforce the laws well enough to lose their ability to protect themselves specifically plans on not enforcing its own laws. "It's ok, folks you can trust the law. Or, at least, the laws we find convenient." I respect a principled stands, no matter how moronic I might believe its cause to be. People who're willing to stick to their guns (oops, um, stick to their, uh, spatulae?) for something they believe in deserve respect. But the folks here are out right now applauding each other for passing the measure, even though its proponents advertised ahead of time that they lack the spine to actually take the principled stand they've espoused. The cowards can only hint at the stand they would make if indeed they actually had principles.

I'm utterly disgusted.