Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Bylaw? You don't think a $100k fine is enough to deter 95% of potential pitbull owners? Naw, Sliver was right, it's hard don't try. Cliff's calling card.
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First of all, it would be absurd to impose a $100k fine - zero chance that would stand up to a court challenge. Fines for banned breeds in other cities are a few hundred dollars. Because proportionality is a thing in the legal system.
Laws themselves only change the behaviour of law-abiding people. To change the behaviour of the kinds of ######s who have vicious pitbulls, you would have to actually catch them.
It’s like drinking and driving. Law-abiding people don’t do it. And making the punishment more severe isn’t going to stop the people who are still doing it. What stops drunk drivers is catching them. But that’s expensive. And since the city only has so much money to go around, they’ve made the calculation that taking 50 more drunk drivers off the road a year isn’t worth diverting millions of dollars a year to check stops from other programs.
Maybe city council will decide at some point that dog attacks are a serious enough problem in this city to warrant increasing the bylaw budget by a million dollars a year to enforce a breed ban. Or maybe they’ll cynically bring in a ban as theatre, knowing they don’t the resources to enforce it - governments do that sort of thing a lot.