If you want to adopt a dog or cat from this Southern California animal shelter, you have to be 25, prove you can provide a pet with a good home — and support gun restrictions.
Membership in the NRA is a deal breaker, said Shelter Hope Pet Shop owner Kim Sill.
“We do not support those who believe that the 2nd amendment gives them the right to buy assault weapons,” Sill wrote on a website for the shelter in Thousand Oaks, California, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles. “If your beliefs are not in line with ours, we will not adopt a pet to you.”
Sill added, “If you lie about being a NRA supporter, make no mistake, we will sue you for fraud.”
Sill, in an interview with NBC News, said quite a few donors to her shelter are Republicans and some have threatened to cut off funds if she doesn’t remove the “Where do you stand on gun control?” question that she now requires every potential adoptee to answer during a screening interview.
“I say, fine, keep your money,” she said. “If I go out of business, as a result, I go out of business. But I have to do something. And this is the only thing I can do to make the point that mass killings by people armed with guns have to stop.”
The National Rifle Association weighed in later Thursday.
“Having this asinine political litmus test comes at the expense of needy and homeless dogs and cats,” said NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter.
Constitutional law expert Nadav Shoked of Northwestern University said in an email that the law appears to be on Sill’s side.
“The federal law is not an issue here,” Shoked said. “It doesn’t apply to stores, and, more important, it only bans discrimination based on race or religion — which is not what the pet store is doing.”
As for state laws, Shoked said, they often “add to race and religion things like gender, gender identity, familial status, marital status, being a veteran, and more” but not political preferences.
“There might also be some specific law or ordinance respecting pet stores or pet adoption practices (the motivation would be anti animal cruelty concerns), but that would be an issue very specific to this type of business,” he added.
Emily Berman, a Constitutional law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said federal law does not protect Americans from discrimination “on the basis of gun ownership or support of gun rights. “
“However, there is also theoretically nothing stopping states and localities from imposing those kinds of rules,” Berman said. “Just as a state can bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, presumably they could also do so on the basis of an individual’s view on guns.”
Sill said she put the new rule into effect May 31 after the Texas elementary school massacre in Uvalde that left 19 students and two teachers dead and sparked another anguished nationwide debate over gun restrictions.
“That was a tipping point for me,” she said. “But there was another reason.”
Four years ago, Sill said, an ex-Marine opened fire at a local watering hole called the Borderline Bar and Grill, killing around a dozen people before killing himself.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/animal-shelter-nra-gun-restriction-foes-no-pets-rcna32674
so basically Fck that place , right people?… right!
like as if dogs and cats are hard to find