Wrong amendment: transit ad censorship.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Citings - Brief article

BECAUSE the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has a rule against ads that "appear to promote the use of firearms," movie studios often have to create special gun-free editions of posters advertising their new releases. In the San Francisco versions of posters for the 2010 cop comedy The Other Guys, for instance, Columbia Pictures replaced guns held by stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg with badges and pepper spray canisters.

The SFMTA never realized there might be a constitutional problem with this firearmphobic policy until Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation, upon learning that Ferrell and Wahlberg had been disarmed, printed up a bunch of ads for the group's September gun rights conference in San Francisco. They featured a woman holding a shotgun while peering through a curtain in her home, under the headline "Can You Afford to Be Unarmed?" The posters went up unchanged at bus stops around the city, and the SFMTA...