San Francisco’s last gun shop has been a defiant fixture against the liberal city’s suffocating arms policies for more than 60 years, but a new set of regulations is forcing the owners to finally throw in the towel.
The proposed new regulations would require High Bridge Arms in San Francisco’s Mission District to videotape all transactions and turn the footage over to police every week, Fox News reported.
The shop has 17 cameras as it is, and turns video over to police on request, Steven Alcairo, High Bridge Arms’ general manager, told Fox News. He believes the city is unfairly targeting his shop.
“This time, it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods,” Mr. Alcairo said. “We feel this is a tactic designed to discourage customers from coming to us.
“This year, it’s this and next year will probably be something else,” he said. “We don’t want to wait for it.”
High Bridge Arms plans to close next month. Days after the ordinance was announced earlier this month, the store announced a closing-out sale on Facebook.
“It’s with tremendous sadness and regret that I have to announce we are closing our shop,” read the post. “It has been a long and difficult ride, but a great pleasure to be your last San Francisco Gun shop.”
City Supervisor Mark Farrell, who publicly requested in July that the city attorney’s office draft the new restrictions, argued that “easy access to guns and ammunition continue to contribute to senseless violent crime here in San Francisco and across the country.”
“Even though San Francisco has some of the toughest gun control laws on the books in the country — there is more we can do to protect the public,” he said in a statement before introducing the package, Fox News reported.
Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, says “video evidence is a critical component in bringing lawbreakers to justice.”
“If High Bridge Arms is so scared of implementing such a practice, my first question would be, ’What do you have to hide?,’” he told Fox News. “Why in the world aren’t we requiring all gun stores to tape sales at this point?”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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