If you’re a Pennsylvania gun owner, you can blame your state senator for the lack of action on pro-gun bills in this state. (Well, unless you live in Sen. Rich Alloway‘s district since he’s the only one willing to actually show any leadership.) If you live in the Philly suburbs under Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, you can definitely blame him for doing his best to make sure that pro-gun bills don’t see the light of day in the Judiciary Committee.
However, last night, Sen. Alloway finally got a vote on the preemption bill as an amendment straight from the floor. (Oddly, if you look at NRA’s latest alert – and even an email I got from a staffer this morning – they say that no vote happened. It’s time to update the website, folks!) Preemption passed the Senate on a 2-1 vote in our favor! Or, at least it passed the first vote to be added to a bill. Now that bill needs to pass.
Now, just to seal up his credentials as going farther anti-gun, Sen. Greenleaf, who used to vote for gun owners many years ago, turned on us again in the vote. I guess bypassing his authority over Judiciary really pisses him off.
If you listen to the anti-gunners, the sky is falling. The ability to hold cities passing illegal gun control laws responsible in the courts is the worst thing ever. They are appalled that NRA members may be able to sue a city and the city might have to pay for the lawsuit if they lose because they were caught violating state laws. Accountability – the horrors!
This fight is clearly upsetting the anti-gun groups, too. One piece of literature they handed out tried to associate Pennsylvania NRA members with members of the KKK.
There’s still a few more steps for this bill to pass, but at least gun owners now have a vote from their Senators on these big issues.
Pennsylvania gun owners, if you wouldn’t mind, take a minute to drop a thank you message to Sen. Alloway. He’s actually a really nice guy, and he works incredibly hard for our rights while the rest of the Senate GOP is happy to sit back and hope you don’t notice that they aren’t actually doing anything to protect your rights. Here’s his website contact form, his Facebook page, and his Twitter profile.
Thanks to Sen. Alloway are in order. Too bad Sen. Matt Smith (Shill-Mt. Lebanon) couldn’t find it in him to stick up for his constituents from rogue municipalities. It’s a shame he was B-rated last cycle, I better not see anything close to that in 2016.
Alloway is one of the rare ducks in politics: he’s an actual gun guy.
Various national news-media sources are reporting this as a done deal and sent back to the House for further consideration.
However,
The Senate docket for today, shows that only the Alloway amendment was voted on last night. HB80 to which the Alloway amendment was added, is on today’s schedule for a Senate vote.
At 12:55 this afternoon, it passed the Senate 34 to 14 and moved back to the House.
The antis are screeching over a state preemption bill to prohibit cities from enacting their own “gun control” schemes, claiming “home rule”? Nothing new.
If there were a bill allowing cities to overlook or ignore state-level “gun control” laws they deem unenforceable, the antis would still be screeching, but not “home rule”: they’d be talking up “consistency across the state”.
They want “gun control”, and they don’t care how or at what level. It’s the only consistent thing about them.