Comment O’ The Day:
“I could be down for this. Maybe it would keep those afraid of any firearm from moving away from the coasts.”
BLUF:
Virginia is concerned about a “bad” America.
The one to which she refers — one in which houses host guns — was previously known to both Republicans and Democrats as just “America.”
When you’re considering moving to a new area, what are the pluses that matter most? Low crime? Good schools? Trash pickup?
A writer for The Los Angeles Times has another metric that may be worth consideration.
“Real-estate listings should include prevalence of gun-ownership in a 50-mile radius…”
She’d also like info on the “number of annual mass shootings in the region.”
“Time to change what a ‘bad neighborhood’ is,” she announced.
What if someone owns a modern sporting rifle, also known as the best-selling hunting rifle in America?
She believes that’d constitute a bad place for children:
“[A]nd introduce a meaningful tax on guns and gun violence. No one should say, ‘This is a great place to raise kids’ about neighborhoods where even one person has an assault rifle.”
Stop all the racializing:
“The metric would be simple. Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m). If that reads as safer or more [free] to some people, Staten Island is for them. If not, maybe time for the Bronx. Take race, class, politics out of the real-estate equation.”
Real-estate listings should include prevalence of gun-ownership in a 50-mile radius and number of annual mass shootings in the region.
Time to change what a “bad neighborhood” is.
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
The metric would be simple.
Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m).
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) June 8, 2021
There’d definitely be a lot of items to track.
In 2018, Switzerland’s Small Arms Survey reported there were nearly 400,000,000 guns in the United States.
That was, obviously, two years before 2020’s gun-buying surge.
As for “assault rifles,” the AR-15’s certainly been vilified courtesy of impressive, dedicated effort by some on the Left side of the aisle.
Meanwhile, of course, ownership of any firearm doesn’t equal impending murder, and the lightweight modern rifle isn’t employed in most gun crimes.
The vast majority of such are, as you know, committed with handguns.

