San Jose passes first US law that gun owners need liability insurance/annual fee | Hacker News Reader

San Jose passes first US law that gun owners need liability insurance/annual fee

cbsnews.com

53 pointsMilnerRoute34 comments

"The council also voted to require gun owners to pay an estimated $25 fee, which would be collected by a yet-to-be-named nonprofit and doled out to community groups to be used for firearm safety education and training, suicide prevention and domestic violence and mental health services."

I find these government-NGO partnerships disturbing. The government mandates a tax, but a private entity collects it and decides who spends it? Elected officials really like to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their votes.

Otherwise known as PPP, Public Private Partnerships. Dubious in all the ways you might imagine.

That's not what this is. This is a long established concept known as tax farming.

That's not what tax farming is.

Given what I've seen with P3's in my neck of the woods, I can see there could be a high degree overlap to the point that P3s are much like the private Roman tax collectors - which had its problems with corruption way back then. So it was, so it is.

I am always frustrated how news article never include the actual law/ordinance/mandate they are reporting on.

I believe this is it:

https://sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=10408009&GUID=...

Found here:

https://sanjose.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=53797...

Follow up, it is hard to imagine this standing up to legal challenges and is also hard to imagine the projected 1 million revenue will offset the legal costs

But it will generate votes at taxpayer expense, and that's all this virtue-signaling BS is meant to do.

Last line of the article is that law firms have already lined up to defend the law pro bono.

I suspect this is 2 parts political grandstanding and 1 part test case, but it'll be interesting to see it play out in the courts. The low dollar amount and revenue collected is probably intentional, so that the lawyers can argue that it doesn't pose an undue burden on gun owners and get the case law precedent opening up the door to bigger taxes later.

It's not too hard - the Supreme Court hasn't immediately dismissed the Texas "nullify the constitution with this one weird trick" approach of deputizing random citizens to end-run around civil rights using civil lawsuits.

This is a pretty common misunderstanding of the ruling.

The Court ruled that the abortion clinics' lawsuits against certain state officials may proceed as they have direct involvement in the enforcement of the law, while the lawsuits against other state officials like judges should be dismissed due to their lack of involvement in enforcement.

You're replying to a misunderstanding they didn't make.

> The Court ruled that the abortion clinics' lawsuits against certain state officials may proceed as they have direct involvement in the enforcement of the law,

Yes, but in doing so, they didn't enjoin enforcement of the law until the SC hearing, which is to say that the court "hasn't immediately dismissed the Texas "nullify the constitution with this one weird trick" approach of deputizing random citizens to end-run around civil rights using civil lawsuits."

Fair, I can see reading of immediately dismissed as meaning granting an injunction.

Edit:

but to be fair to the SCOTUS, they were being asked to endorse a novel method of injunction, not barring a party, but a shutdown of the court hearings, essentially a new trick to counter texas' new trick

> but to be fair to the SCOTUS, they were being asked to endorse a novel method of injunction, not barring a party, but a shutdown of the court hearings, essentially a new trick to counter texas' new trick

Their ruling on injunction was clearly along republican party lines, and not on the lines of their own reservations about legal conservatism. It's okay to call a republican supreme court what it is, we all know that these justices wouldn't hesitate to issue a novel injunction if it were second amendment rights being trampled.

> It's okay to call a republican supreme court what it is, we all know that these justices wouldn't hesitate to issue a novel injunction if it were second amendment rights being trampled.

Do we? It was like five minutes ago that two Republican Justices used textualism to decide that Congress had already made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal back in the 1960s. Virtually every time you see a Justice go wobbly in some major case, it’s a Republican appointee.

What case was that? I would like to check it out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I don't think this was a political ruling against abortion. This is small fries and they don't need to politic around with the injunction when they already have the option to have steak and overturn all federal abortion precedent via Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

Even then, it will be hard to argue that if it is legal conservatism or the personal beliefs of the judges, because they both come to the same conclusion. I say this as someone who supports the right to abortion, but the textual line between the Roe vs Wade and the constitution is tenuous at best, and even worse with reinterpretation under Casey.

California proposed an identical law but replaced abortion with certain types of gun, the Texas governor said it was an unconstitutional attack of gun ownership.

The idea that you can make a law that explicitly says “you can’t use the unconstitutionality of the law as a defense” and that isn’t immediately tossed out clearly demonstrates the the republicans on the SC are biased. Hell the most recent appointee said she considers the Bible to be more important than the constitution and that she puts her faith ahead of the law (she said all judges should do that)

The SC has never had the power to unilaterally toss out laws. They hear cases. When one party says a law is unconstitutional and another party pushes back, then they can decide if it is unconstitutional (and needs to be thrown out). Cases about the constitutionality of the Texas law has not yet made it to the SC.

I don't think so statements of the Texas governor means anything about the biases of the Supreme Court.

Every Christian in the US puts God above the constitution, so this shouldnt be shocking. Even the democratic president would say the same

A judge does not get to do that. She said she believes a judge should act according to their faith rather than the law if they don't agree.

It's also irrelevant if "every" christian believes that (a dubious claim), as america is not a christian nation.

So many stories do this. I think it a feature not a bug, they don't want readers leaving or making it too easy to fact check.

Regardless of my stance on gun rights, this is means testing equivalent to a Poll Tax and is unlikely to stand up to a court challenge.

If we want gun rights reform you have to take it to the Constitution; anything after that erodes the rest of the rights by creating case law that a right can be limited in some way by some level of the gov.

Arbitrary tax to exercise a constitutional right? Let’s see this stand up in court.

I have a constitutional right to work. Yet I am still taxed. Wait.. What? The right to private property does not mean you can't be taxed for it.

"Shall Not Be Infringed"

I truly wonder what they really meant by this. Surely we can twist the meaning of words through legal interpretation until we can levy a tax on people for exercising their constitutional rights.

I mean, we already twisted the meaning of "well-regulated militia" to mean "literally everyone" including clowns like this[0] so why not?

[0]https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/11420/production...

The text is "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

That means that the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. It does not mean that only the militia has the right to keep and bear arms.

Thank you, Constitutional scholar 'yes_really,' the Supreme Court will no doubt be humbled by your brilliant and objectively correct interpretation. Clearly they never needed to bother arguing the point in Heller vs. DC, they could have just read the text of the amendment, it's so obvious.

The Court got it wrong anyway.

But per the gun license fee, there's no problem if it is considered a tax. Govt can levy taxes on property.

"Written material, being necessary for an educated populace, the right of the people to keep and own books shall not be infringed"

Question: who has the right to own books under such a law? The 'written material'? The 'educated populace'? Or the 'people'?

Gun leasing is a real thing, and so is financing. If you lease in another state the commerce clause might protect you see a lawyer for details: https://www.guns.com/financing

It’s CBS News!

A premier authoritative journalistic reporting outfit that never includes a citation (much less an URL link).

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