Guilt-Trip Didn’t Work, So Now Regulations Follow Gun Store’s Recent Move
It’s amazing how guns and alcohol are treated similarly despite being very different. I don’t just mean that one is a liquid and one is a solid. Elementary science is too obvious, after all. What I mean is that while alcohol can and sometimes is consumed on the premises of a retail location, guns are almost never used on those premises. Unfortunately, many towns try to act like they are.
Goleta, California wasn’t one of those. Maybe they didn’t think it would ever be an issue, but when a gun store secured a location that had been vacant for three years, some members of the community lost their minds. They tried to guilt-trip the owner.
It didn’t work, so now they’re trying something “new,” but it’s as old as governments.
City of Goleta representatives said they have taken note. They acknowledged that there are no current restrictions on where a gun store can open within town limits. A business license was issued to Goodland Guns to operate in the new location in early June.
Continued public outcry over the issue, however, has sparked action at city hall.
“We are going to bring some options back that could lead to a change in our zoning or an ordinance that would put potentially more restrictions where gun stores could be located,” Goleta City Manager Robert Nisbet told SFGATE via phone Tuesday.
Nisbet said the issue is slated for discussion at the upcoming City Council meeting on Sept. 1.
He said while he couldn’t speak for what the City Council will ultimately decide to do, he noted that he believes it is “looking forward to putting greater restrictions on [gun stores].”
Nisbet noted that while the city currently allows gun shops only in commercial zones, it would be unable to ban them altogether. “There’s the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms,” he said. “Cities cannot really restrict gun stores [wholesale] within a city. You can’t do it.”
“The general concept is to make it more restrictive, what we define as sensitive zones, places like a daycare,” he added.
Again, it’s not like gun stores are notorious shooting locales. There aren’t stray bullets flying hither and yon from the parking lot.
People go in, conduct perfectly lawful business, and then leave.
What Nisbet, though, is telling us is that they’d rather have left a commercial property vacant where it apparently had a history of being broken into and vandalized, thus making it more of an eyesore, than see a business move in and restore it into working order.
Goodland Guns owner Dan Ashton sat down with Cam on Thursday to talk about the situation, but from my point of view, he’s done nothing wrong, and some people in Goleta need to get their knickers untwisted.
Of course, what follows from this kind of “thinking” is that gun stores get relegated purely to higher crime areas, then get blamed for the higher crime, even though they’re simply not allowed to operate elsewhere.
Nisbet himself said it. The concept is to make it more restrictive to do business if you’re a gun store owner. Daycares aren’t going to be impacted by a gun store’s location unless some parent gets distracted by whatever Kel-Tec came up with next instead of remembering to pick Junior up on time. That’s about it.