The antis love to suggest that some guns are just too dangerous to entrust to civilian hands. The obvious counter is that a great majority of people who own Evil Black Rifles (like…99.999%) do nothing more dramatic than punch holes in paper with them. You don’t take the personal freedom and property rights of the 99.999% away because of the misdeeds of a few insane idiots.

Breed bans (typically directed at Rotties, Pits, Shepards, etc) are no different to my mind. We do have a terrible dog fighting problem here in Baltimore, but much like our homicide problem is a function of dysfunctional, evil, destructive people and not guns (my guns and most Americans’ guns have never harmed anyone), the dog fighting problem is a function of depraved people like Michael Vick who should probably find their way to straightjacketed mental institutions for a very, very long time.

Taking my harmless, sweet, doting 45lb pittie away from me isn’t going to solve the dog fighting problem anymore than handgun bans have made DC a safe city. Never mind that the same semantical issues will plague a pit ban (what about half pits and quarter pit mixes? What about dogs that look like pits but really aren’t? There’s a substantial school of thought that indicates the meager statistical evidence that pits are a threat to people is inflated by the inclusion of pit mixes and dogs that look like pits but aren’t…these days most any medium sized short haired dog with a wide head and pointy tail is assumed to be a pit when in reality many aren’t). People forget that before the explosion in popularity of the breed in the 1980s, other breeds were the over-represented ones in dog bite stats. The difference? Media bias and hype. The image of urban thugs training vicious dogs in dark corners of dark cities sells copy.

For the record: before I became Captain Pigtown, for two years I volunteered at the Baltimore Animal Shelter working with dogs of every stripe. I handled and saw more dogs in a week than most people see in a lifetime (the shelter handled over 18000 per year!). I hate to appeal to authority…but unless your name is Caesar Millan, you probably haven’t experienced as much about dog personality and behavior as I have. So, that said, let’s be clear–almost everything you’ve heard about the evils of pit bulls is media hype and nonsense. It’s no different than all the evils you’ve heard about hollow point bullets, AR15s, and .50BMG rifles downing 747s on approach.

Their jaws don’t lock. They don’t have inate human-aggressive tendencies (which is exactly why they’re NOT used as police dogs, they tend to not do well in situations that require action against people…pits are notoriously lousy guard dogs as they tend to curl up at the feet of intruders and beg for attention). While they do have powerful jaws, there’s no evidence that their jaws are quantifiably more powerful than those of any other mid-sized to large canines. Hell, my lab border collie mix has won his share of fights with much larger dogs, and has jaws that turn 8 inch diameter logs into sawdust in minutes. He can crack a cow knuckle in seconds.

So let’s can the hysterics, and recognize that the same mentality that’s telling you you can’t be trusted with the family pet is what powers gun controller nonsense. Denying me the right to own whatever dog I want to love and care for because of what some inner city thuglifer does for his sadistic kicks is insanity of the worst bent.