In the crowded race for the at-large seat on the Oakland City Council, name recognition could very well play a major role in who ends up winning election this November. Unfortunately, the candidate who’s probably best known to Oakland residents would be bad news for gun owners in the city. 

Former police chief LeRonne Armstrong does bring some baggage to his campaign. Armstrong was fired as the city’s top cop in February, 2023, with Mayor Sheng Thao saying she’d lost confidence in his ability to lead the force amidst an investigation into alleged misconduct by a police sergeant. Armstrong has sued to get his job back, and while he hasn’t been successful in those efforts to date, he’s now turning his attention to the city council as part of a political comeback. 

While serving as chief, Armstrong pushed back against the city’s efforts to defund the police department to the tune of $17 million. But Armstrong also took issue with the relatively few number of lawfully-armed citizens in the community. Not long before Armstrong was cut loose by the mayor, he said he didn’t want business owners to arm themselves to guard against armed robbers or other violent criminals. The then-chief was responding to a liquor store owner who allegedly fired four rounds into the air in an attempt to scare off a robber who was assaulting someone on the sidewalk outside his store (though a law enforcement source in Oakland told me that the business owner actually shot at the robber because he believed the victims’ life was in danger). 

Days later, Armstrong doubled down on his anti-2A rhetoric. In a press conference, Amstrong emphatically stated, “we don’t want our business owners or others to begin to arm themselves. We would really prefer them to be good witnesses.”

“What we really don’t want to do is bring any additional issues that threaten safety into the equation,” Armstrong continued. “Having armed people out there tends to not be helpful. Officers sometimes have to determine who they’re trying to encounter and that also makes it unsafe for all of us. So while I appreciate those who have stepped forward and are looking to help our community members and be there and intervene, I think you can do that with your voices, you can do that with making phone calls to the OPD, but allowing us to come in and respond.”

As you might imagine, Armstrong is leaning into his career in policing as he tries to make the leap to the city council. He’s pledged to increase the number of officers in the Oakland PD, a campaign promise that appeals to those concerned about the high rates of violent crime in the city. But while Armstrong may hold some views that aren’t part of progressive dogma, his contempt for citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights are right in line with what you’d expect to see from a Bay Area politician. 

But beyond all the public squabbles, Armstrong is also the highest-profile prospect to succeed Rebecca Kaplan in the “at-large” City Council seat, which — unlike the other seven council members — represents the entire city and not an individual district.

A Black native of Oakland, he has proven to be both popular and widely respected in the community, and his promise to renew the city’s focus on robust policing marks a shift away from earlier efforts by the city’s leaders to rethink how public safety could be achieved. 

… Armstrong has promised to boost Oakland’s police staffing by several hundred positions, though he acknowledges this may take several years in a cash-strapped city.

Getting there, he says, may require slashing overtime pay for cops and forcing alternative non-emergency response programs, like the MACRO program, to rely on outside grants instead of city money. MACRO aims to move nonviolent, nonemergency 911 calls away from police over to a team of mobile responders.

Multiple controversies have kept OPD under federal oversight two decades after a series of brutality cases, but Armstrong doesn’t believe the department is fundamentally broken — rather, he says, it’s as flawed as any other institution made up of people.

“If you have a thousand cases and one of those cases comes up with a problem, that doesn’t mean there’s a systemic issue,” Armstrong said.

The same could be said for gun owners in Oakland, but Armstrong seems to think that gun ownership itself is a systemic issue that needs to be solved. 

It may be that every other candidate for the at-large seat on the city council is just as opposed to armed citizens as Armstrong is, but that doesn’t excuse his own hostility towards the Second Amendment and those Oakland residents who choose to exercise their rights. There might not be any good choices for Oaklanders who want to be able to keep and bear arms without disdain from city officials, but as far as I know Armstrong’s the only candidate who’s used his position in city government to bash beleaguered citizens who just want to protect themselves and their families.