Boston residents ignore the anti-gun "Safe Homes Initiative"

By Brian S. Stewart

The Boston metropolitan area totals 3,406,829 people. As of April 30, it looks like 3 of them have taken advantage of the city's controversial anti-gun program billed as the "Safe Homes Initiative."

The Boston Herald is reporting that two mothers have called the police to report guns owned by their teenage sons. Apparently desperate to cite more than two incidents of "success" in the 7th largest city in the United States, the police "were also touting a May 1 call from a concerned Roxbury citizen who saw teens place a suspicious object in a neighbor's back yard that turned out to be a shotgun hidden among rocks." A .22 pistol, a 9mm pistol, and a shotgun someone left in their backyard underneath some rocks - I bet the streets of Boston are safe now.

As we have previously covered, the Safe Homes Initiative originally called for massive, blanket house-to-house searches of Boston neighborhoods. With outcries coming from community activists and defenders of civil liberties alike, the city was put on the defensive. But the program is still alive, even if barely, as the Herald describes:

"Under the program, homeowners or parents can sign a waiver allowing a search team of clergy and plainclothes Boston police assigned to the public schools to conduct the search. In exchange, cops promise not to arrest the offenders for illegal possession, saying the goal is to take as many weapons off the street as possible."

The article also offers up a statement from Chief of Police Edward Davis saying that "the community's involvement is 'indicative' of a 40 percent drop in shootings this year." It doesn't sound like the communities want anything to do with this program, so if there really has been a 40 percent drop in shootings, the police are going to have to entertain the notion that it was a result of something else.

With less than a handful of instances in which people have participated, the so-called Safe Homes Initiative is rightfully being ignored by a vast majority of the citizens of Boston.

Brian S. Stewart is a former infantryman and an Iraq War veteran. He recently graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in Political Science.