On Tuesday, I noted that Newport News, Virginia was considering banning guns in all government buildings. I wrote a lot about why this was stupid, how it wasn’t going to do much of anything, and how it really needed to not happen.
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Unfortunately for folks there, it seems that either none of the city council members read that piece or, if they did, were unmoved, because they went and did it, and not by a small margin, either.
Newport News City Council voted 6-1 Tuesday to prohibit guns in buildings owned or used by the city government — despite opposition from several local gun owners and gun rights activists.
Councilman John Eley was the sole dissenting vote. He said he believed people should have the right to carry a gun where they want to, saying it’s “a free country.”
“If you cause harm against me or my family, I want to be able to defend myself,” Eley said.
The city currently prohibits the open carrying of firearms in city buildings and facilities. Concealed carry was allowed for those with a concealed handgun permit. But in 10 days, when the amended rule goes into effect, firearms will be prohibited in city government-owned buildings entirely, as well as any recreation or community center facility operated by the city or by any authority or local governmental entity created or controlled by the city. Violators face a civil penalty of $500.
In buildings the city uses but does not own, the ban on firearms would extend only to the part of the building being used when the building is being used for a governmental purpose.
Mayor Phillip Jones said his goal was to increase safety and security. The prohibition of guns — along with numerous other safety measures the city recently implemented — follows an audit of the city’s security.
“The audit showed us that we had room for growth and room to improve our overall safety infrastructure, and we took that to heart,” Jones said.
Neither the audit nor its findings were made publicly available as of Tuesday night.
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I find that downright fascinating, don’t you?
Granted, I get it. You don’t want to be public about your vulnerabilities because it just makes it easier for someone to plan how to exploit them. Anyone can do it if they take the time, but they’d have to do the legwork. A security audit is, in theory, would cover all that same legwork.
Yet, on the same token, you’re also voting to infringe on people’s right to keep and bear arms based on a security audit that no one else has seen or evaluated. Is it actually in there? Is the company that did the audit trustworthy on the issue, or do they have a long history of taking issue with the people’s right to keep and bear arms?
As they used to say back in my day, inquiring minds want to know.
My guess is that whoever did the audit sees armed citizens as a threat, which is the biggest mistake they could have made. People with concealed carry permits have been shown to be more law-abiding than police officers, judges, and elected officials of any kind. They’re not the threat.
The jackwagons who voted for this, though? They’re the threat.
They’re a threat to the people of Newport News. Unfortunately, those are the same people who elected them in the first place, so it’s on the voters to fix this…assuming the courts don’t, that is.
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