Pit bull ban debate: still going strong, 6 months later

By Seattle Crime Blog editor & publisher Rob La Gatta

It feels good to be back in the blogosphere...and it looks like I haven't missed much over the past few weeks. Why, over at SLOG, Dan Savage and his band of cronies are still debating an issue that should have been laid to rest months ago: the foolish, overreaching, never-gonna-happen ban on pit bull ownership.

In his post today, Dan - who seems to rely on sob stories about dead children to prove his point - makes a hasty statement:

A breed ban is a blunt instrument, and it’s imperfect—just like a handgun ban. But I support the latter for the same reasons I support the former.

But here's the problem: handgun bans aren't just "imperfect"; they're completely ineffective. If this prohibitionist had been paying attention to the political climate over the past few months, he'd know that handgun bans have been a hot news item as the U.S. Supreme Court makes up its mind on District of Columbia v. Heller.

A March article from the AP offered some (un)surprising statistics on the effectiveness of Washington D.C.'s handgun ban, which took hold in the mid-1970s and is the center issue in District of Columbia v. Heller:

Since the [D.C. handgun ban] was passed, more than 8,400 people have been slain in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns.

When it comes to bearing arms, there are two kinds of Americans: those who view handguns as a last resort tool of defense, and the more knee-jerk crowd that sees them primarily as a means of committing violence. The latter seem unwilling to accept that guns aren't bad, even when the statistics prove otherwise.

I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that "banning" anything - drugs, alcohol, guns, dogs - is at its core a lazy way of solving problems that simply does not work. We've seen it in the past with Prohibition, and we're seeing it today with the War on Drugs and the D.C. handgun laws.

Though perhaps enticing to individuals unwilling to take the extra steps toward only penalizing those who've done something wrong, make no mistake: a breed ban is a clunky approach advocated by busybodies uninterested in supporting more effective methods. Instead of calling for an all-out ban, Dan Savage should do the responsible thing: focus his efforts on punishing people who have violent dogs. What breed those dogs happen to come from is utterly inconsequential.
Topics: Animals