Do you ever get the feeling like the powers-that-be behind breed-specific legislation (BSL) play god and giveth and taketh BSL away?   For instance, I wonder if people in Rhode Island and Massachusetts are wondering if their respective states passed legislation prohibiting BSL only long enough to supposedly “prove” that municipalities within that state supposedly need BSL after all.  

They are doing the same with gun control right now.   Washington D.C.’s and Chicago’s handgun bans were proven unconstitutional.   But sometimes it seems like, in Chicago in particular, residents were only given freedom to own handguns long enough for the city to “prove” that crime supposedly went up. (In actuality, statistics have historically shown that violent crime has gone down as gun sales have gone up, though you wouldn’t know it judging by the news.)  

Forget that Chicago has been down several hundred policemen, no, the crime, they’ll say, is due to all the guns on the streets.   And what is the “cure” for all this supposed gun violence?   Why, it’s a return to a ban on guns of course, or such restrictive gun control that nobody will actually be able to own guns.   In this way, the powers-that-be are the cause of and “solution” to the very problem they created.   I call it the powers-that-be playing god: giving and taking away inalienable rights that our actual God gave us.  

I believe the same M.O. is being used with breed-specific legislation.   The states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts have passed legislation prohibiting breed-specific laws within their states.   I don’t know what goes on on the back channels, but if it’s anything like Chicago, then Boston and Pawtucket will allow about as much crime as they need to supposedly “prove” their points, whatever those points may be, whether it’s just that Boston and Pawtucket supposedly need breed-specific laws to curb crime, or if they need gun control to control crime, or both.  

Regardless, it won’t just be about taking people’s “pit bulls” away.   They’ll want your guns too, and they’ll try the same specious arguments for both BSL and gun control; they already have.   If Oakland, California is any indication, they’ll want to ban “hammers, wrenches, slingshots, shields and presumably anything else with a blunt edge such as garden rakes or sticks.”   In other words, anything you can think of to defend yourself, or to use Oakland’s wording, any “tool of vandalism” one could use during a “protest.”   So, I guess folks in Oakland won’t be able to rake their yards, hammer a nail, or screw in a screw during whatever the city of Oakland defines as a “protest.”  

Oakland’s not the only city with a screw loose.   As we reported to you yesterday, and as I opened this post by saying, Boston is claiming that “pit bulls” are becoming more problematic since Massachusetts passed legislation prohibiting breed-specific laws.   Boston’s mayor, Thomas M. Menino, audaciously blamed some of Boston’s crime problem on “pit bulls.”   Pawtucket, Rhode Island has likewise made “pit bulls” the scapegoat for their crime problem.   Apparently some politicos have an unwritten rule that whatever you can’t scapegoat with guns and crime, you can scapegoat with “pit bulls.”  

But are you buying this folks?   Both Pawtucket and Boston admit, though perhaps inadvertently, that they have problems with crime, and yet they pass the buck to so-called “pit bulls” and their owners?  

Yes, it’s true that criminals can and have exploited so-called “pit bulls” to defend their drug houses or gang hangouts (though this criminal element is in the extreme minority compared to law-abiding owners of dogs erroneously called “pit bulls”).   And if a breed-specific law for “pit bulls” is put back in place as Boston’s Mayor desires, then if a criminal abides by the breed-specific law, which is doubtful, what’s to keep him from just switching to another breed?   Do you think so-called “pit bulls” are the only loyal “breed” who will warn their master that an intruder — whether police serving a warrant or rival gang members, dogs aren’t typically discerning enough to know the difference — is crossing their property lines?

The other obvious counter argument to Boston’s claim that so-called “pit bull” maulings are on the rise, or Pawtucket’s claim that BSL has supposedly reduced so-called “pit bull” attacks, is that since a “pit bull” can be defined as anything “authorities” want it to be, all they have to do to pad bite statistics, or reduce them, is start, or stop, calling every mixed-breed dog that attacks someone a “pit bull.”   Voilà, they’ve created, or eliminated, the very problem they claim BSL is the only solution to.