Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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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.

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I have avoided commenting on this for some time now, but as more and more folks continue to jump on the anti pit bull bandwagon, I felt that someone needed to stand up against this absurdity.

First, let me preface my comments by saying that I don't own a dog and have no intention of ever doing so; I find domesticated canines to be dirty and overly needy (not to mention completely unnecessary for urban dwellers). Frankly, I much prefer cats.

But despite this position - or perhaps because of it, and the unbiased perspective on dog ownership that it offers - I still find it ridiculous that so many people are speaking out against pit bulls as pets.

It comes as no surprise that the some of the leading anti pit bull advocates in our local community are members of the editorial staff at The Stranger, Seattle's stereotypical "alternative" weekly newspaper. In a December 27 post on pit bulls gone wild that appeared in their SLOG, Dan Savage comments that it's "[t]oo bad we have to wait until a pit bull attacks before we shoot the damn things." Then, in his Morning News post yesterday, Savage describes the dogs as "crazed killing machines."

The debate moved a bit higher on the journalistic ladder this this morning, when Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur made clear where she stands on the debate.

Brodeur's column explores the idea of a citywide ban on pit bull ownership, similar to the one enacted by Enumclaw in 1990, using a pit bull attack sob story to illuminate her obvious point: that these dogs have no place in our society.

From the piece, "What's a dog-loving city to do?"

One look at Colleen Lynn's arm, and I was chilled — then enraged.

She bears six purple marks where a pit bull's teeth sunk in, and a plate beneath her skin to shore up a fractured bone. Six months after Lynn was attacked while running on Beacon Hill, her arm is just 25 percent healed. And that's nothing special.

Between January 2002 and August 2007, the city of Seattle recorded 1,519 dog bites. Pit bulls were responsible for 361 of them — 24 percent.

[...]

Lynn, 38, a freelance Web designer, has been slowly, tentatively researching a citywide ban on pit bulls, or a requirement that the dogs be sterilized. "I have to prepare myself to be massively intimidated," Lynn said Monday. "But we need to recognize the problem. Our community is suffering."

"Our community is suffering?" No. A small segment of our community - 361 of nearly 600,000 Seattle residents - is suffering. Does a problem facing less than 1% of our population warrant an all-out ban on ownership of a dog that, according to Sunday's P.I., makes up more than 1,500 of our city's 48,329 pet dogs?

The problem is that Colleen Lynn is too emotionally entrenched in the issue. Of course she's going to go after pit bulls...one attacked her! I feel her pain. No one deserves to be mauled, and its understandable that in such a situation, a victim will look for someone/something to blame. But Lynn's push for a ban on pit bull ownership is no different than, say, George W. Bush's push to depose Saddam Hussein because he was "the guy who tried to kill my dad." When we let personal experience and the emotion surrounding it consume us, we lose sight of reason. Anyone who can look past Lynn's bias and is willing to weigh the facts will know that the obvious answer to the question posed above is "no."

The idea of restricting what type of dogs we can own is, quite simply, an assault on freedom. And thankfully, I'm not the only sane person in this debate. From Brodeur's column:

Ledy Van Kavage, senior director of legal training and legislation with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said breed bans are ineffective and a waste of money.

"This is America," she said. "You should be able to own whatever breed you want."

You want to end pit bull attacks, Seattle? Provide more stringent safety regulations for their owners. Weigh heavy fines against folks whose pit bulls get loose. Restrict pit bull ownership on individuals with a history of animal abuse or negligence. But blaming the dogs is absurd; as Brodeur and the P.I. point out, only 361 pit bull attacks happened over a five year period - despite the fact that since 2003, Seattle has had a steadily rising population of these dogs.

What it really comes down to is stereotypes: people oppose pit bull ownership because the occasional brutal attack leads fear-mongering newspaper editors to hype up the threat. As is so often the sad case, these reporters at The Stranger and The Seattle Times are looking for solutions without addressing the real problem. When small children are acting like beasts in public, do we look at them with disgust? No; we blame their parents, who as child-rearing adults have a social duty to control their children.

Dog ownership should be no different. Seattle needs to hold people - not their pets - responsible for community safety.