03/26/2020 / By JD Heyes
As more governors and mayors issue “stay-at-home” orders in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that include mandatory orders to close “non-essential businesses,” we’ve begun to see a pattern here.
Most of the city and state leaders issuing the orders are from Left-wing, Democrat-run jurisdictions.
But we’re also seeing another pattern: Increasingly, gun stores are being placed into the ‘non-essential’ category and ordered closed, even as the virus spread threatens to get out of hand while grocery store shelves go bare and the stock market tanks — leaving Americans more vulnerable to chaos and death by disorder.
As local Fox11 reported Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, acting on orders from mayors and governors, has begun ordering gun shops closed for an indefinite period of time — until the stay-at-home orders are lifted, which is impossible to know at this point.
The local station reported:
In a sit-down interview with FOX 11, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva declared gun stores as nonessential businesses that will be forced to close.
Sheriff Villanueva also said he’s adding 1,300 deputies to patrol, that he’s released 1,700 nonviolent inmates from county jails, and criticized how local politicians have handled the messaging behind the numerous stay-at-home orders.
“This is about taking care of people, not elected officials or politicians,” he said, adding that press conferences held to discuss the spread of the virus and what officials are planning to do are often long on congratulatory phrases and short on actually dissemination of important information.
“When I see the same faces and they’re saying a lot but there’s no substance, you eventually become background noise and people just tune you out,” he said.
He pointed out that until Monday of this week, neither he nor any other law enforcement officials had been invited to or included in any Los Angeles County coronavirus press conferences. He said he believes that most residents have simply stopped listening to the chattering classes in officialdom. And he intimated that the decision to close gun stores was made without any participation from his department or other police agencies. (Related: There may be 10 million Americans infected with the coronavirus right now, based on the trend of confirmed fatalities.)
“When we’re communicating the shelter in place or the safer at home, there’s a lot of anguish, however, the people who have to enforce it are public safety, and we were totally out of the process, we were not involved,” he said.
But what he also said about gun stores is disturbing.
“We will be closing them, they are not an essential function,” Villanueva told Fox11. “I’m a supporter of the 2nd amendment, I’m a gun owner myself, but now you have the mixture of people that are not formerly gun owners and you have a lot more people at home and anytime you introduce a firearm in a home, from what I understand from CDC studies, it increases fourfold the chance that someone is gonna get shot.”
He’s not the only legal authority to deem gun stores non-essential.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court approved mandatory gun store closures as part of coronavirus-related shut-downs of businesses.
“The order to shut down gun stores was part of a larger plan set forth by the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, mandating the closure of businesses not deemed “life-sustaining.” Gun-rights advocates asked the state’s Supreme Court to block the order as it applied to gun retailers, but the seven-member court denied the request,” the site reported.
So, just to make this crystal clear, what we’re seeing from local officials in times of declared emergencies that the Second Amendment’s “shall not be infringed” clause isn’t a hard-and-fast requirement but merely a suggestion that can be ignored.
This is dangerous.
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Tagged Under: chaos, closure, coronavirus, courts, covid-19, disaster, disorder, firearms, governor, gun rights, guns, guns stores, infringement clause, Liberty, Los Angeles County, mayor, non-essential, orders, Pennsylvania, Second Amendment, self-defense, shelter-in-place, SHTF, stay at home, Wuhan coronavirus
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