The city council of San Jose, California, passed a first-of-its-kind ordinance Tuesday requiring gun owners to purchase liability insurance and pay a yearly fee to the city in an effort to prevent gun violence.
San Jose’s more than 50,000 legal gun owners will have to pay the city an annual fee of about $25 plus “administrative costs” beginning in August if the ordinance is ratified in a February vote, NBC reported. The goal is to reduce the amount of city resources spent on gun crimes, which the city said costs taxpayers $40 million per year.
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“Tonight San Jose became the first city in the United States to enact an ordinance to require gun owners to purchase liability insurance, and to invest funds generated from fees paid by gun owners into evidence-based initiatives to reduce gun violence and gun harm,” Mayor Sam Liccardo announced.
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Liccardo introduced the proposals last June following a mass shooting that killed nine. He said Monday that “the modest fee paid by gun owners will directly support community-based organizations” seeking to reduce domestic violence, prevent suicide, and increase access to gun-safety training.
“Overwhelmingly, gun owners and their families will benefit most from those programs, because the services will be focused to reduce risks of harm precisely where that risk is greatest: in households with guns,” he said.
Gun safety advocates applauded the move for making gun owners more responsible for what happens with their weapons.
“Between 2010 and 2019, 56% of women murdered in the U.S. were killed by a firearm, and its time to shift the burden of the injury to people who carry guns,” said Esther Perales-Dickman, a domestic violence awareness advocate.
Critics argued that the ordinance is unnecessary and unconstitutional. The National Rifle Association has threatened litigation, while the Silicon Valley Public Accountability Foundation said the measure is “aimed squarely at punishing legal gun owners instead of identifying the underlying causes of violence in our city and addressing those issues to stop rising crime rates. Three of the proposals are duplicates of existing felony laws, and at least five of the policies are unconstitutional. Not one of them will prevent gun violence in our city.”
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The mayor’s office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s inquiry about the number of gun crimes committed with legal and registered weapons as opposed to illegal firearms, seizures of which reached a new high in 2021. San Jose police seized 864 illegal guns by August 2021, while they seized 844 in all of 2020.
