Despite the legal challenge against the new enhanced preemption law, the law is already paying off. Norristown council has revoked its lost and stolen ordinance.
In light of the recent amendments to the Pennsylvania Uniform Firearms Act, which grant an expansive right of legal standing to individuals and membership organizations to challenge a local gun control ordinance,†the ordinance said, “which further provide for exorbitant damages that can be shifted to the municipality if unsuccessful in defending its ordinance, council has determined that it is in the best interests of the municipality to remove any regulation of lost or stolen firearms.â€
It’s amazing how these municipalities were so confident in the legality of these ordinances when they were being passed over objections that they were illegal, are now are suddenly not so confident with the near certainly they will be sued and held accountable.
What we saw down here in Florida is that some counties/cities were quite open about ignoring preemption because it had no teeth. Many people caught by their bogus laws either didn’t know about preemption (crappy lawyers, or not smart enough to insist on one) or didn’t have the money to fight a long court battle. Once we managed to pass legislation that gave preemption teeth, a number of these places folded like cheap lawn chairs. Others had to be dragged kicking an screaming into court (work on that front is still on-going).
I’m very happy to be a member of Florida Carry, who has been the tip of the spear on a lot of this. They have done some very good work down here.
Congrats Pennsylvania for passing for passing your enhanced preemption. I believe it is an important step forward for civil rights, and needs to be passed everywhere.
s
One of the concerns Sebastian had was that because the law was passed in a questionable way, it won’t be able stand in court. But it just occurred to me that just by mere passage, it’s going to force cities who wish to fight it to go to court…and while the penalties may ultimately be declared Unconstitutional, the cities will nonetheless be forced to justify their laws, which are nonetheless illegal anyway…
So even this shady law may be enough to just cause many jurisdictions to roll over, and say, “we’ll go ahead and repeal these illegal laws, rather than to try to fight the teeth that pre-emption has been given…”
It would be interesting to see which of these cities put those laws BACK in place (in spite of preemption) as soon as Enhanced Preemption is overturned in court (that is, of course, IF that happens).
We saw cities down here in Florida openly state that they knew their laws violated preemption, but since there was no penalty, they passed them anyway. That is what spurred on the fight for enhanced preemption down here in Florida in the first place. Now that there IS a penalty, for many cities, it STILL takes a lawsuit get them to overturn their invalid, preempted, laws. Many of them wait for the lawsuit to be filed, then change their laws before the lawsuit has time to get through the courts, thereby escaping the penalty because once the laws are changed the lawsuit is considered moot and is dropped. I haven’t read enough about it to know if this would be how the Penn law would work, but I suspect probably. It’s sad that we can’t just yell “HAHA! Enhanced Preemption!” and have the penalty kick in immediately. I guess the cities would just counter with “Ollie ollie oxen free!” or some such.
s