Pit bull ban debate: still going strong, 6 months later
It feels good to be back in the blogosphere...and it looks like I haven't missed much over the past few weeks. Why, over at SLOG, Dan Savage and his band of cronies are still debating an issue that should have been laid to rest months ago: the foolish, overreaching, never-gonna-happen ban on pit bull ownership.
In his post today, Dan - who seems to rely on sob stories about dead children to prove his point - makes a hasty statement:
A breed ban is a blunt instrument, and it’s imperfect—just like a handgun ban. But I support the latter for the same reasons I support the former.
But here's the problem: handgun bans aren't just "imperfect"; they're completely ineffective. If this prohibitionist had been paying attention to the political climate over the past few months, he'd know that handgun bans have been a hot news item as the U.S. Supreme Court makes up its mind on District of Columbia v. Heller.
A March article from the AP offered some (un)surprising statistics on the effectiveness of Washington D.C.'s handgun ban, which took hold in the mid-1970s and is the center issue in District of Columbia v. Heller:
Since the [D.C. handgun ban] was passed, more than 8,400 people have been slain in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns.
When it comes to bearing arms, there are two kinds of Americans: those who view handguns as a last resort tool of defense, and the more knee-jerk crowd that sees them primarily as a means of committing violence. The latter seem unwilling to accept that guns aren't bad, even when the statistics prove otherwise.
I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that "banning" anything - drugs, alcohol, guns, dogs - is at its core a lazy way of solving problems that simply does not work. We've seen it in the past with Prohibition, and we're seeing it today with the War on Drugs and the D.C. handgun laws.
Though perhaps enticing to individuals unwilling to take the extra steps toward only penalizing those who've done something wrong, make no mistake: a breed ban is a clunky approach advocated by busybodies uninterested in supporting more effective methods. Instead of calling for an all-out ban, Dan Savage should do the responsible thing: focus his efforts on punishing people who have violent dogs. What breed those dogs happen to come from is utterly inconsequential.
Speaking of positive results due to ban-lifting:
http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7629
Legalization makes it less appealing!
stupidity can typically be identified and frequently tagged with most SLOG-related things.
truth be told, i completely agree. banning a breed is 100% ridiculous and ineffective. if banned, another breed will take the pit bull's place as taboo and fearsome. what people fail to realize is that it's the owner, not the dog.
the fact that the SLOG is still talking about this issue and savage's actual argument further exposes the laziness of post innovation. perhaps the slog team should analyze the age-old notion of quality over quantity.
i too digress...
What about the medical use of methylamphetamine hydrochloride? There is no point half-doing things, what you get then is a tier system of societal compliance,
it is like saying it is ok to have a G3 Assault Rifle to shoot rabbits. all that does is empower recreational use by corrections officers in white prison towns.
I got sucked into that medical thing with the feds, they banged somebody up, I was chewing the fat, they did bad things to this person at a federal facility, I dropped a dime.
I really can't go into the details, suffice to say, that a few BOP screws were very fuckin' unhappy. I don't give a sick pig's fart about corections officers, but feds are smeaky bastards.
I was the only fuckin' white person picked up for not having a green card in San Diego in 1986, that's entirely unfair, I had ancesters at the battle of Five Forks, darn it, they kind of made the USA, almost official,
They were on the opposing side, the half-starved crew, but in a real sense, they made the bigger contribution, by throwing it in, besides, the neighborhood had went to heck. Which is another reason I'm a blue badge person
My ancestors show up looking for a spade, nuthin too dangerous, and are given a rifle, neither the Roxbury dudes with the spades, or the Southies got paid, so tell me about this slavery fuckin thing again?
Weed makes ya skitso, that's another thing, if you can't put it in a glass rocket, it's not a real drug, the entire hippie thing was a mistake,
In the late sixties the commies told us their missiles couldn't hit shit, the little darlings cried their eyes out
It turens out that the Cuba missile crisis was because they didn't want the dope fiends at the CIA to know they could hit nebraska from Russia,
We were thinking if they need Cuba their rockets have to be half-pint models.
So don't smoke dope in a missile crisis.
Tazia Doll
I think my inherited stray pitbull (that just might sniff and lick you to death if you venture too close) probably dropped that deuce all over your front door. And I give him mad props for it.