On Monday, I wrote about a shooting Sunday morning at a pizza place in Tucson. Nine people were shot, though none were killed, thankfully. Unsurprisingly, the mayor jumped immediately to call for gun control to be passed in the pro-gun state. It’s pretty typical of urban mayors, unfortunately, but they typically get away with it.
The area where this happened, though, has a history of problems, and the owner of the pizza place is less than thrilled with the mayor’s remarks.
Empire Pizza is speaking out less than three days after a shooting left nine people injured outside its downtown location, calling on local politicians to shift their focus from gun control to public safety.
In an Instagram post shared Monday night, the restaurant said it was “disheartened to see the focus of this tragedy shift to gun control,” claiming that approach has “zero applicability” to what has been happening downtown. The business said two victims were sitting on its patio at the time of the shooting.
21-year-old David French has been arrested and is accused of shooting the nine people early Sunday morning South 6th Avenue and Congress Street.
Empire Pizza cites crime, drug use downtown
In its post, Empire Pizza said safety downtown has decreased over the years and that thefts and drug use have increased. The business said the real issues are crimes not being prosecuted, open drug use in public restrooms, and a lack of maintenance on downtown Tucson’s streets. The restaurant, which has operated in Tucson for more than 16 years, said it broke their hearts to see what downtown has become.
Empire Pizza declined an interview and said everything it wants to say is on its social media platform.
Mayor Regina Romero doubled down on her belief that the problem is because of supposedly easy access to guns.
Except that’s not exactly it. The suspect in question is a convicted felon, so he couldn’t lawfully own a firearm. Yet his conviction was recent, and rather than getting the prison sentence that aggravated assault with a deadly weapon should have garnered him, he got probation.
Couple that with the reported history of criminality in that part of the city, and what you’ve got is a massive problem that has nothing at all to do with the gun laws. You have violent felons getting probation rather than prison. You’ve got open drug use and theft in the neighborhood. You’ve got crimes that are simply not prosecuted at all, and Romero thinks the problem really is that there aren’t enough gun laws in her state.
Seriously.
It’s insane that she went there, but this is par for the course, isn’t it? How many times have mayors and other officials who are soft on crime overall try to blame gun rights for their problems, all while they refuse to get tough with the people who are clearly the real problem?
Honestly, it’s all too common in this day and age, but it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t even be a thing.
Tucson is supposedly going to look into increasing police presence in the neighborhood and working to improve what the media called a “consistency” of charges, but considering Romero is pretending that her government is already doing plenty seems laughable based on what Empire Pizza is claiming.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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