This Daily News editorial is a prime example of the Philadelphia media being clueless dolts:
Unable to concentrate. Unable to focus on anything other than . . . their next gun buy.
Pennsylvania’s gun addicts are already going through withdrawal, as the planned four-day halt on gun sales to allow the state to update its computerized background checks grows closer.
The Pennsylvania Instant Check System is used by gun store owners to do state and federally required criminal background checks on potential customers. It will be closed for upgrading from 6 p.m. Sept. 2 to noon Sept. 6. That means that no guns can be sold.
Gun store owners are hot. The shutdown coincides with the beginning of the early dove and goose hunting season, a popular time – at least in some parts of the state -for gun sales.
Seriously, most hunters I can promise you have no idea PICS is going to be down during that period, and this is a busy time for outfitters and gun shops. What do you expect from businesspeople who are going to have their business shut down for several days during a critical sales period? Would you expect restaurant owners to not be angry if there was a ban on food sales for several days? What makes gun shop owners different, other than the Daily News editorial staff doesn’t like what they sell? That this even passes for serious journalism in Philadelphia shows how far the news media in our city has fallen. I’ve seen C-list bloggers write better stuff.
Hat tip to k-romulous.
UPDATE: Clayton links:
The hunting weapons, with a few exceptions, aren’t the cause of the violence in Philly. It’s largely handguns. Maybe they should ask why it is that the hunting parts of Pennsylvania–which are awash in guns and Republicans–don’t have anywhere near the problem with murder that Philly and cities with the misfortune to be too close to Philly have? Hint: it’s the culture, and the unwillingness to send murderers away, not the guns.
Absolutely! And just in case any Philly folks start thinking, “Well, then we can just restrict handguns, because they cause the crime rate in Philly,” Pennsylvania issues more than 600,000 licenses to carry firearms. Philadelphia only represents 32,000 of those. So the rest of the state is awash in handguns as well as long guns, and yet, if you take Philadelphia out of the equation, Pennsylvania’s crime rate is on par with most of Western Europe. That’s why I keep saying Philadelphia doesn’t have a gun problem; guns are everywhere in this state. I refuse to accept a condition where people in the city are judged unfit to have the means to protect themselves from people who will get guns anyway, and I definitely refuse to accept the rest of the state, which doesn’t have a problem with misusing firearms, has to pay for the fact that a minority of the population in Philadelphia have the self-control of Britt Reid.
I’m wondering, can the dealers write off the four days of shut down as a loss for thier taxes?
How about a four day moritoriam on printing newspapers?
Wait, I thought gun sales couldn’t be stopped just because the background check system isn’t working.
If the instant check is down, Brady waiting periods apply, and there’s extra state paperwork that has to be done for the background check to be executed manually.
Let’s suspend the first amendment for four days and see if the stupid sonofabitch suddenly understands the issue.
Just sent those same sentiments to the paper, everybody should.
See their reaction to a four day shutdown of all abortion clinics, so the state can check them all for cleanliness. That should get the message across.
All very good points for my letter to the editor.
Interesting that you mentioned Britt Reid. It looked like from the article, the fact that he’s stumbling around but had to be taken to the hospital for a blood test rather than the immediate breathalyzer sounds like opiates or prescription stuff rather than alcohol.
There were more overdoses in Philly last year than gun homicides. Anyone seen an article on the drug problem facing Philly youth? My observation is that gun homicides occur largely in the “dealer class,” while the overdoses occur in the “user class”.
The constant focus on guns not only excuses the actions of those who commit the crime, allowing a convenient scapegoat, but the news media largely misses the macro-view that (many of) the gun homicides are part of the competition in the thriving multi-billion dollar illicit drug business, despite the long-defeated “war on drugs,” which I’d argue made things worse (ditto for “war on poverty,” and even worse- we’ve declared “war on terror”).
So the view that removing gun ownership will help solve the problem is laughable at best because it’s such a myopic view of the problem.
And by the way, what a bunch of morons of the DN.
To be fair, it’s not journalism, it’s an editorial. Kind of a dumb and unfocused one too. I can’t find the first article I read on this, but they did do some research in picking those shutdown days and determined that an average of 380 something sales happened during those days in previous years vs. 900 plus for each of the subsequent three weeks.
Lawsuit filed. See here.
Andrew:
I also consider editorializing to be journalism as well. If the Daily News had printed what you just said, that wouldn’t have drawn my ire.
Most of the concern I have about this is it’s something that shouldn’t actually require an outage at all. The PICS database isn’t actually remarkably huge if you compare it to what the banking and credit card systems, or even a typical online retailer have to deal with, and all of those industries manage to do upgrades without any downtime. A clean cutover can be done.
I don’t think this is deliberately aimed at screwing retailers, I just think the State Police aren’t talking to the right kind of IT people. I have no problem with them doing a PICS upgrade, even if it would cause an overnight outage, but three days is a bit ridiculous, by just about any reasonable IT good practices standard.
The outage will be no real inconvenience for me personally, since I have no plans to purchase a firearm during that period, but shutting out business for several days is a major burden for retailers, especially considering long guns, the type that will get sold for hunting season, can legally be purchased outside Pennsylvania (handguns can only be bought in state from licensed dealers, with a background check, at least legally).
My anger over the article is the suggestion that we’re all sitting here like addicts, shaking, that we can’t buy guns for a few days, when that’s not really what it’s about. It dismisses our concerns as illegitimate rambling. The suggestion that the types of guns sold in advance of hunting season, and the type of people buying those guns, are somehow responsible for the violence in the city is also rather insulting.