San Franciscans, would you believe there’s a renewed gun rights movement rooted right here in our liberal City by the Bay?
And it’s growing — albeit gingerly — among one of our oldest local groups: The San Francisco Chinese community.
Now, let me not sensationalize. The numbers of folks involved are still in the hundreds, according to organizers.
But growing fear is creating an environment ripe for growth: If you read Chinese-language newspapers, a perception of rising crime against Chinese locals is the hot story of the moment.
Statistics have not yet borne out a rise in crime against the Chinese community, but a handful of crimes have been high profile enough to stir people mightily.
From a 74-year-old woman kidnapped in Crocker-Amazon and raped for almost five hours, to the public, daytime beating and robbery of the 56-year-old chairman of the Wong Family Benevolent Association, violent crime has gripped local Chinese news media and its audience in recent months.
Wendy Wong, for one, is fed up feeling like a victim, she told me.
The 32-year Sunset District resident and her group, the Coalition for Good Neighborhoods, are organizing gun education meetings for the San Francisco Chinese community.
“If the police [are] not able to enforce the law, if the victims are not protected and we have been victimized, again and again, and again, it’s about time for us to unify and see how we can protect themselves,” she said Wednesday.
She told me she isn’t a “pro-gun” person. “I’m not like that. Eye-for-an-eye is not what I believe in,” she said. But after the recent high-profile attacks, people in the Chinese community are “paralyzed” by fear, she said.
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“I believe there will be more people,” Wong said. Gun range operators reached out to her after the World Journal coverage dropped.
When I first read the World Journal story, with the handy-help of Google Translate, my jaw dropped. You have to understand, San Francisco is so firearm-unfriendly we don’t even have a gun store anymore.
But Wong is far from alone.
Mayoral candidate Ellen Lee Zhou also backs arming the Chinese community.
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“Can you imagine if all the Asian people owned a gun and they could protect themselves?” she told me Wednesday, with a lilt in her voice conveying this would be her utopia.
I, of course, had to push back a bit — what about all of our recent mass shootings? Didn’t more guns in our society make those possible? Think of Gilroy, I said.
“The people who shoot at us, the mass shootings, they’ll always get [guns], because they’re bad,” she answered. “Good people like you and me, who have common sense, if we could carry we could come out and defend ourselves.”
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/news-colu...y-crime-scare/
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