Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Hollywood Hills elites are arming up
After decades of blaming guns on the streets for violent crime, and elections of district attorneys who actually believe that crap, Hollywood's elites are finally getting religion on gun ownership.
They're arming up.
According to the Daily Mail:
As Long Angeles crime spirals out of control, even some of the city's wealthiest residents have flocked to Beverly Hills' only gun store to buy firearms to protect themselves and their belongings.
Beverly Hills Guns first opened by appointment only in July 2020, and has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following some high-profile smash and grabs and violent home invasions in recent weeks, Los Angeles Magazine reports.
Many are self-proclaimed progressives who've never even held a gun before, but who've been so spooked by soaring crime in the famously wealthy enclave that they've decided to arm themselves.
It appears that the gun control solution these palmy leftists have prescribed for violent crime is drawing a different response.
And with good reason. Violent crime has surged in Los Angeles County, and not just in the crummy parts.
A well known socialite and philanthropist, Jacqueline Avant, was shot and killed in her own home on Dec. 1 by a career criminal in the terrifying act of cat-burgling, and her home had a security guard.
In October, a star of the reality television show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was subject to a similar smash-and-grab incident in her Beverly Hills home. The criminals departed as millionaires.
A tony Beverly Hills restaurant, Il Pastaio, saw a patron robbed of $500,000 in a brazen robbery where a gun was put to his head, and another patron was actually shot.
According to the New York Post, it's a trend:
Investigators have said seven people have been robbed of "high-end jewelry" and Rolex watches between Jan. 30 and Feb. 15 in west Los Angeles neighborhoods bordering Beverly Hills, including nearby Wilshire, the Times reported.
Meanwhile, just days ago, a man taking out his garbage on the still-fancy north side of the hills, in Studio City, was set upon by thugs who busted into his home for a smash-and-grab ransacking, zip-tying his handicapped son.
Thugs with guns are turning up all over the place in Beverly Hills, a small independent city encircled by gargantuan Los Angeles, where the district attorney, George Gascon, has ended sentencing enhancements for gang members and lobbied for enhanced charges for the use of guns during the commissions of crimes. According to David Shellenberger, quoting a local cop:
In 2020, the Beverly Hills Police Department pulled 18 guns off Rodeo Drive. You go back any year before that, and it may have been zero to one or two."
Meanwhile, a prominent Los Angeles police union official advised tourists to stay out of Los Angeles because the likelihood of the defunded and depopulated police there protecting them from violent crime is pretty low.
So, yes, it makes sense that the Hollywood elites have grown rather quiet about the need for more gun control and instead are arming up.
Actress Alyssa Milano, for one, a very loud gun control advocate, declared that she had two guns in her home in 2019.
But more recently, we see statements like this one, as reported by Shellenberger:
"I've always been anti-gun," said Debbie Mizrahie of Beverly Hills. "But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We're living in fear."
Here's a recent BET report about young black Hollywood actress, Meaghan Good, who gave a heart-to-heart to Charlamagne Tha God, the influential-in-the-black-community radio host (who otherwise is known for inadvertently exposing Kamala Harris as a hypocrite):
A guest on Charlamagne Tha God's Comedy Central show Tha God's Honest Truth, the actress said she would feel more comfortable with a gun in her home after seeing home invasions on the rise in Hollywood.
"You know, what's crazy is [that] for a long time, I felt like I didn't. But now, with everything that's going on, I would feel more comfortable with a gun."
Good continued her reasoning and noted why she previously believed not having a firearm at home outweighed being strapped.
"The reason before my thought was like if something did happen to me, would I have the time to pull out a gun to defend myself?" she said, adding she never hopes to shoot a gun at her residence. "I don't want to kill anybody or hurt anybody, but I will defend myself."
Again, makes a lot of sense.
The bottom line here is that Gascon, who serves as D.A. for gigantic Los Angeles and is now subject to a recall, has unleashed a crime wave so big onto Los Angeles that it's now spilling over into the tony adjacent enclaves such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and the Hollywood Hills. Those residents cannot protect themselves, and the various crimes being reported, none of which ever happened in the recent past, have spun out of control. Robberies, killings, and lots and lots of gun crimes by criminals have left them no choice but to arm up, and they're doing it. Los Angeles County itself shows a sharp spike in applications for gun permits.
Creatures like Gascon, however, and his coeval in San Francisco, the God-awful Chesa Boudin, as well as various Soros-financed D.A.s around the country, have done their dirtiest to end the idea of punishment for violent crime and are simply letting them all out. California's governor, so well supported among these Hollywood elites, up until now, has been a notable gun-grabber. He hasn't said much lately, though.
Boudin in particular talks of taking guns off the streets, and Gascon and Boudin both yap about taking "ghost guns" off the streets, because guns, not bad guys, are the problem. That doesn't explain the gun sales in places like Beverly Hills. The gun-buying is a reaction, not a prequel, to the violent crime that has sozzled the area.
The bottom line here is that that criminals can use any weapon they like, but the fact that they know they'll get let out by these anti-law D.A.s simply serves as an incentive to commit more crimes again. That's the root of the problem, and even Hollywood elites now know they're alone out there, so maybe a gun will help them.
It's ironic indeed to see these gun sale surges and background check surges in these tony blue enclaves. Turns out that Gascon and his ilk are the biggest gun salesmen out there, and some kind of wising up seems to be happening among even the ritziest of the entertainment industry elites, a Latin Americanization of sorts with bulletproof glass going up on those sliding glass doors, nights on the town with no flashy jewelry, nor fancy cars to be seen in, the whole spectacle of conspicuous consumption disappearing among this crowd...and guns for self-defense now appearing in drawers.
Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.