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Animal shelter demands support for gun control or they ‘will not adopt a pet to you’

June 11, 2022 | | Print Article

In today’s divided world, even pets are being politicized, as one Southern California animal shelter compromises the well-being of the animals they seek to home with a demand that all prospective owners declare their support for restrictive gun control measures before allowing them to adopt.

Located in Thousand Oaks, Ca., the Shelter Hop Pet Shop added in May a question to its standard list of inquiries made of potential pet owners: “Where do you stand on gun control?”

Answer in a manner that does not affirm the political ideology of shop owner Kim Sill, and she “will not adopt a pet to you.”

“We believe that if we can make our voices heard on how we feel we can make an impact,” Sill wrote on the shelter’s website. “We do not support those who believe that the 2nd amendment gives them the right to buy assault weapons.”

“If your beliefs are not in line with ours, we will not adopt a pet to you,” the site declares.

The discriminatory move against law-abiding citizens does not, in fairness, come without some traumatic context.

As Sill notes, “Our community of Thousand Oaks became part of all the other cities in America, now scarred with the reputation of a mass killing.”

In November 2018, a gunman entered the crowded Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks and opened fire, killing 12 people with a .45 caliber pistol, including a responding sheriff’s deputy.

As BizPac Review reported at the time, the shooter, 28-year-old Ian Long killed himself at the scene.

Long, a Marine Corp veteran who had served in Afghanistan, had been previously visited at his home by local sheriff’s deputies for a disturbance. Like so many suffering with mental illness, he was cleared by Ventura County mental health specialists because they “didn’t feel he was qualified to be taken under 5150,” then-Sheriff Geoff Dean said.

 

Sill, it turns out, had her own run-in with Long prior to the tragedy.

“The shooter that killed 12 innocent humans at The Borderline Bar came to our shop for community service hours,” Sill explains. “We believe he had scouted many locations and we were one of them.”

“We changed our policy about volunteering after that incident,” she said, “but now we feel confident to go even further than that.”

And that step further means you have to be willing to have your Constitutional rights trampled upon if you want to provide a loving home to a needy animal.

And don’t even think about lying to Sill. She’ll sue.

“If you lie about being a NRA supporter, make no mistake, we will sue you for fraud,” she warned.

Clearly unconcerned about the dogs and cats languishing in her shelter, Sill is steadfast in her willingness to keep those animals from having a happy, healthy life if it means they won’t have to endure an owner who believes in the Second Amendment.

“[I]f you are pro guns and believe that no background check is necessary, then do not come to us to adopt,” she states. “We will grill you before you even get an appointment and visit our rescue. If we ask you ‘do you care about children being gunned down in our schools?’ If you hesitate, because your core belief is that you believe teachers need to carry firearms, then you will not get approved to adopt from us.”

Even those animals too weak or too young to be adopted are to be sacrificed for Sill’s cause.

“If you foster for us and believe in guns, please bring our dogs and/or cats back, or we will arrange to have them picked up,” she instructs generous animal lovers.

Republican animal lovers, to be specific, are many of whom donate to Sill’s shelter, The Hill reports.

Appearing on NBC News, Sill revealed that those donors have threatened to cut Shelter Hope Pet Shop off if she doesn’t remove the question from the adoption application.

“I say, fine, keep your money,” Sill told NBC. “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.”

Sill’s hope, as stated on her website, is that “if we stand up for change and activate our rights” unconstitutional restrictions on the right to bear arms will come to fruition.

Perhaps, but according to Mom-At-Arms.com, she will likely lose her shelter’s 501(c)(3) status first.

While the shelter could have opted to stay within the law and raise funds for anti-gun groups, “the minute they brought in political causes unrelated to their mission and purpose as a prerequisite for adoption, they opened the door for more trouble.”

“Sometimes people need to keep their emotions in check,” wrote Mom-At-Arms, “as virtue signaling in order to discriminate against people for no reason other than an unrelated position on a civil right is an easy way to get sued and cause harm to your organization that had a specific purpose, which in this case is animal welfare.”

Melissa Fine
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