Hey, It's Not a "Gun Ban"....

Inspired by these two posts, I decided to make a little map of my town: Salem, Oregon.

The first post, by Sebastian over at Shall Not Be Questioned, goes over a petition at Change.Org to prevent a strip mall property owner from leasing a space for a gun store, on account of the space being "too close" (two city blocks) to a school. Part of the description mentions that four other schools are within five miles.

The second link looks at how a "five-mile rule" (wherein guns cannot be bought or sold within five miles of a school, even from/to retail FFL dealers) would affect Houston, Texas. There's no legal space left to buy/sell/trade guns, anywhere in town!

So today we're going to examine what even a paltry "one-mile rule" would do to the gun business in sleepy little Salem, Oregon*.

Here's a map of Salem with a bunch of schools — "certified" pre-K, K-12, and higher; public and private — marked out by red dots (and graduation caps; Google fills those in for some schools for some reason):

Click to embiggenate

Note: The initial Google search was "public schools", but I added several more dots by hand to cover private, post-K-12, and pre-K campus locations. I won't claim to have gotten them all, but as you'll see next, it really doesn't make much difference.

Here's the same map, with a 60-pixel-radius (which represents one mile, judging by the scale in the lower right; I counted) red circle superimposed over each dot:

Again, click to embiggen

Remember that this map, unlike the map of Houston, is filled with one-mile circles, not five-mile circles. But do you see many places where gun shops could legally be located? Envisioning a two- or five-mile ban is an exercise I'll leave to the reader.

The anti-rights crowd claims they don't want to ban guns; they just want to enact "common-sense, reasonable" restrictions on where and when guns can be bought, sold, traded, stored, transported, carried, and used. Including within X distance from schools, churches, public buildings, parks, playgrounds, shopping malls, movie theaters, homes, offices, and parking lots. For the children, don't you know.

But we're supposed to believe it's not a gun ban.

Don't ever let anyone tell you they're not trying to take your guns.

Stay safe.
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* - Salem, despite being the capital of Oregon, is not a big city. It's about 12.5 miles north-south and maybe 8 miles east-west, at the longest/widest points (and that's if you include West Salem, which is in another county and is therefore technically a different city. A "five-mile rule" on just the six public high schools in the district would effectively cover the whole town.