Pit bulls and pit bull mixes are a danger to society. Start denying homeowner's insurance to anyone with a dangerous breed of dog, and go from there.
It's a start, I suppose, but realistically, I think, it would only affect a tiny fraction of irresponsible powerdog owners. It won't affect renters, who are easily able to have dogs without landlords' knowing it. It won't affect people who lie to their insurance companies. Anecdotal, I know, but in my immediate neighborhood, a mix of mostly nice homes with a few junkers tossed in, the ONLY pit bull-type dogs are at the two low-rent junkers.
As we see again and again on these threads, there are many responsible owners of powerdogs who passionately defend the dogs and blame on the owners all cases of rampant dogs causing damage, as if the breed had nothing to do with it. It's the owner, not the breed! is the mantra. And it's 50 percent true 100 percent of the time.
But the thing is ... if all those problem owners had greyhounds, poodles, spaniels, etc., there wouldn't be a problem. Not that those dogs don't bite -- they do. But those dogs rarely kill or maim to the point of the victim needing prolonged surgery. (Not withstanding solosmoke's recent thread where she FINALLY, halleluja!, found her Holy Grail, a case where some labs, instead of pit bulls or Rottweilers, killed a woman! Aha, PROOF that poor pits and rottweilers are being unfairly DOGGY PROFILED!!!).
When responsible owners attack folks like us, who DO engage in DOGGY PROFILING!!!, they're on defense, and fighting the symptom, not the cause. I think they should take a page out of the Minutmemen's notebook, create neighborhood posses, and look for the thousands of irresponsible owners whose potentially lethal powerdogs can be easily spotted through inefficient fences, on weak chains or tethers, etc. Each one of those dogs represents fairly good odds of yet another bad-press news report about how a pit bull or Rottweiler killed or nearly killed a human being.
If I was a powerdog owner who really wanted to do something to prevent further outcry to ban dangerous dog breeds, I'd deal with the cause, (careless power dog owners), not the symptom (people who complain about the dogs). I'd get off the stick and start doing some SERIOUS peer-pressure intimidation of people who are irresponsible owners of powerdogs. Forget irresponsible owners of poodles, spaniels, labs -- they're not the problem, and pretending they are will only make powerdog defenders lose credibility.
Banning breeds would be a bad thing, wrong on many levels. There must be another solution, but it won't happen until powerdog defenders develop the stones to actually make judgement calls and face up to the truth that this is NOT solely a problem of bad owners -- the breed of the dog is KEY.