“California animal shelter won’t adopt dogs to Second Amendment supporters, vows to sue people if they lie about their beliefs”. This is one online headline today.
NEWS AND COMMENT: Shelter Hope Pet Shop, Thousand Oaks, California, USA was “created to aid shelter and pet adoptions, promote education and bring awareness to the communities we serve”. And, they are in the news big-time. They are all over the online news media for the simple reason that they have banned the pro-gun lobby from being customers of theirs. To put that another way, they have banned opponents of stricter gun control laws who want to adopt a pet from their organisation. That is quite a dramatic move which is why it has gathered a lot of press coverage.
However, the owner of Shelter Hope Pet Shop, Kim Sill, has a very good reason for her strict and dramatic policy; so strict that she has said that she will sue anyone who has lied about being a supporter of the National Rifle Association (NRA) when adopting from them. In other words, if a citizen of California goes into this shelter and asks to adopt an animal, they have to declare that they are not a member of the pro-gun lobby and they do not oppose stricter gun laws and if they lie Kim says that she will sue them!
The reason is that the shelter is near a bar which was the site of a mass shooting in 2018 where 12 people were murdered. The killer had volunteered previously at Shelter Hope Pet Shop. That is the connection between this policy and the rescue.
Kim Sill announced her policy after the shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas. She said in a newsletter: “We believe that if we can make our voices heard on how we feel, we can make an impact. We do not support those who believe that the Second Amendment gives them the right to buy assault weapons. If your beliefs are not in line with ours, we will not adopt a pet to you.”
She added: “If you believe that it is our responsibility to protect ourselves in public places and arm ourselves with a gun – do not come to us to adopt a dog. We have a choice of who we work with. Shelter Hope chooses to work with only like-minded humans.”
She admits that she has received threats since introducing the policy when asking a question on gun control included in the adoption papers issued by her shelter.
Further, she has declared that if anyone who has adopted a companion animal from her organisation opposes stricter gun laws then they should return the animal that they adopted from the shelter.
Brave indeed and I for one love it. The difficulty is in finding out if people lie about their gun proclivities.
Below are some more pages on cat shelters.
I don’t think ANY political agenda should stand in the way of pet adoption. Pet adoption is sacred.
Yes and no. I am a strong supporter of a change to gun laws. Logic dictates that change is needed. But I agree it is not great to restrict adopters.
Gun restrictions in other countries may work, but in America no gun laws can prevent nutjobs and criminals from getting their hands on guns. Because in America there are millions of stolen guns in circulation. Every neighborhood drug pusher has a selection for sale for less than the price of a legal gun.
This is an unintended legacy of 50 years of our failed “War on Drugs”. All the arrests and long prison sentences were supposed to eliminate illegal drugs, but all they did was raise the price of illegal drugs, so addicts turned to burglary to afford their drugs. What did they give their pushers to buy their drugs? Mostly stolen guns.
There are millions of stolen guns in circulation in America now. Politicians who want gun control act and talk as if legal guns were the only guns. None of their proposed laws even tries to do anything about stolen guns. Even if all legal guns were confiscated, nothing would keep a violent nut from getting any gun he wanted from any number of local drug pushers and they’d cost less than a legal gun costs.
The cities with the strictest gun laws have the highest rates of gun violence. These laws do and will only make it onerous and expensive for law-abiding people to buy or keep a gun. All that means is that criminals and nutjobs won’t worry that anyone might shoot back. Unlike Europe, Americans have so far been unwilling to pay taxes high enough to hire enough police to ensure reasonable response times.
So, we know that unless you’re close to a police station, you’re on your own. If there’s a mass killer or armed robber, or a gangland shoot-out, most likely everyone will be dead by the time the police can get there.
Frequently, even when the police are there, they do nothing (as at Uvalde). Here in the Western US, we’re accustomed historically, due to thin populations and great distances, to inadequate law enforcement (thus the “Wild West”) and needing to depend on ourselves and our neighbors. It has become a tradition.
In the Eastern cities, and our large cities in the West, they’re foolishly more supportive of gun control laws than Americans elsewhere, and they’re more confident of police protection, which is why their murder rates are so high.
Despite how shocking and repugnant these mass killings are, it behooves to remember that these atrocities are unrepresentative of the real problem, and only account for a couple of dozen of the thousands of Americans murdered each year, most are from robberies.
I’m posting this because it’s never mentioned in the media, so it’s not surprising that Europeans and Canadians don’t understand the relationship Americans and people in Latin American countries, for that matter, have with guns.
Jon, many thanks for your very instructive comment. I have learned something from you which is much appreciated. As I have mentioned before, to outsiders USA gun laws look very strange. And the high rate of homicides and the high rate of these mass shootings seems catastrophic and tragic to outsiders.
But what I’d like to hear from you on is how you would actually reduce the very high level of gun-related homicides in America which as far as I recall is only just behind Venezuela!
Totalitarian liberal political correctness strikes again. Their major concern should be finding good, caring homes for their animals, not trying to enforce their misguided views on gun “control”