The Clark County Commission is totally promising to be good, if only voters will give it a chance. Trust us, they say, as they adopted Tuesday an ordinance that would prohibit elected officials from seizing a person’s property and giving it to another person.

An ordinance? We thought there already was a law in place that prohibited that. Something about “…nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

Get it? No private property shall be taken for public use, unless there’s just compensation. And because it doesn’t specifically allow private property to be taken for private use, and because all powers not enumerated in this little document are considered off-limits, that should do it.

And that’s not just the Clark County Commission’s ordinance talking. It’s the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Oh, wait, that’s right: The Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government, or so that rascal Joe Sobran likes to say. Since the Supreme Court has slowly come to define “redevelopment” as a “public use,” even if the people doing the redevelopment are private actors, the Fifth Amendment’s clear language today means nothing.

Thus, the ordinance. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves: The county only adopted the ordinance after some Nevada residents wrote PISTOL, the People’s Initiative to Stop the Taking of Our Land. And if that title seems angry, so are the folks behind it.

The initiative has some good parts — prohibit private-private land transfers with government acting as the sovereign middleman; force government to pay legal fees for challenges to eminent domain proceedings. But it also has some bad ones, like the line that could be interpreted to require compensation if the zoning of your land, or a nearby parcel, is changed. Or the prohibition on land-banking, which is sometimes necessary to build long-term road projects like the Las Vegas Beltway.

Hence, the ordinance. It is aimed at pacifying would-be PISTOL supporters and preventing them from voting for the initiative in November. (Good luck; it’s running strong in the polls.)

“It’s a smokescreen to erode support for PISTOL. This ordinance is not strong enough,” says Don Chairez, who is running for attorney general on the Republican ticket. He tells the Review-Journal that he doesn’t care if the measure inconveniences government, or ends up costing more, so long as private property is safe.

Here’s the thing: It seems that with the Supreme Court’s years of rulings, culminating in the Kelo v. New London decision that gave rise to PISTOL in the first place, there’s no private property anywhere that’s safe.

Still, the county’s move is a step in the right direction, and Commissioner Bruce Woodbury deserves credit for leading the charge.