Category: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Democrats, particularly Western Democrats, are pushing the house leadership to drop the gun control issue.  They know it’s going to hurt them if gun control becomes a big issue, and Democrats are seen as the ones pushing it.

Kotik says the Democrat-controlled House should be focusing on issues such as property tax reform and health care. Kotik says he and the other members who signed the letter should not be asked to put up votes on social issues he believes are likely to go nowhere in the Republican-controlled Senate.

He’s absolutely right.  It makes no sense for Democrats to address an issue like gun control when there’s no chance of passage.  Ed Rendell has a lot to learn about the state he governs.

I know some people pooh pooh e-mail as being a poor means of communication with representatives, but I’m impressed that I got such a quick response from Representative Daylin Leach on the issue I e-mailed him about, basically outlining the same points I did in the post below. Here’s his response:

I understand your rhetorical point but I think comparing speech to guns (or any right to any other) is apples and oranges. We don’t restrict the number of E-mails because there would be no state interest (“compelling” or otherwise) in doing so. But where there is a compelling interest in restricting speech to preserve public safety, we do so.

In states where it has passed, one-gun-per-month has, at least on a temporal basis (comparing crime rates shortly before and shortly after the law went into effect) shown an average reduction in gun violence of about 30%.

It does seem to be common sense that if I want to go into a store and buy 20 cheap hand-guns to sell on the street, but find I can only buy one, that will mean 19 illegal gun-seekers will be disappointed and have to look elsewhere. Some will find a gun elsewhere right away, some won’t. If all straw-purchasers are similarly affected, it will be increasingly difficult (although certainly not impossible) to buy illegal guns on the street. This will save some (but not all) lives. But if it’s your 6 year old daughter who doesn’t get shot by a stray bullet as she plays on the porch; that will be very important to you.

I think we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on this. Actually, I included e-mail spam as the compelling state reason for limiting people to say, 50 e-mails a month. Who sends 50 e-mails a month? That’s 600 a year. It won’t affect anyone but spammers. Spam costs the economy billions of dollars a year. No compelling state interest in trying to stop that? We don’t accept those kinds of prior restraints on speech, why should we on firearms?

As for the assertion that it has lowered crime, I’m pretty sure he’s confusing that with a study done on ATF tracing data, using a subset of traced firearms in 1996 that appeared in the JAMA. The problem is, ATF has said again and again that its tracing data can’t be used to draw conclusions about crime guns. Therefore, these studies lack a real scientific rigor, because they don’t use a representative example of crime guns. It’s possible, though, that maybe legislators have some data that I don’t have.

Either way, if you look at cities who are in one-gun-a-month jurisdictions, like Baltimore, the crime rate is still atrocious — nearly double that of Philadelphia. Maryland and Virginia are still the largest source of crime guns for Washington DC, which bans all guns, despite the one-gun-a-month law present in both surrounding states. Even if one-gun-a-month has a temporary effect on crime, it would seem that the criminals have no trouble figuring out how to get around it.

So I still question why a law, even if it only affects gun owners at the margins, passes a strict scrutiny test when a) the criminal activity it’s meant to stop is already unlawful, and b) there are is a profound lack of good evidence it actually works.

Or in Bryan Miller’s case, lose big, but say you won. He’s spinning the tabling of HB 29, the lost and stolen gun bill, as an example of progress for his agenda. It’s true that the bill was tabled, but not for the reason Bryan thinks. It was tabled to save the Governor embarrassment, and it was the anti-gun forces that were mostly in favor of tabling it. It was tabled to avoid having it defeated outright, along with the other two bills. Let’s take a look at the votes, shall we? These were the representatives who were willing to go on record with a vote on this bill:

Representative Deberah Kula, D-52
Representative Joseph A. Petrarca, D-55
Representative Ronald S. Marisco, R-105
Representative Thomas C. Creighton, R-37
Representative Craig A. Dally, R-138
Representative John R. Evans, R-5
Representative Glen R. Grell, R-87
Representative Beverly Mackereth, R-196
Representative Carl W. Mantz, R-187
Representative Tina Pickett, R-110
Representative Todd Rock, R-90
Representative Katie True, R-41

Gee, those are all pro-gun Republicans, save two Democrats from districts that don’t look too kindly upon the Governor, or gun control. The Democrats who voted to table this bill, but voted against one gun a month were Pallone, Ramaley, and Walko. Gabig is the only Republican not voting for the other bills who switched sides and voted to table HB 29. I don’t think, given the pro-gun forces wanted this bill voted on, it’s reasonable to conclude this is a sign of progress for Bryan Miller’s legislative agenda for Pennsylvania.

One has to wonder if Mr. Miller were a boxer, he’d declare victory because the other guy only managed to crack a few rips, break a wrist, but failed to break his nose.

UPDATE: Rustmeister has more

One of our state reps seems to understand why Gun Control has a hard time going anywhere these days:

State Rep. Dan Frankel took note of the e-mails he received last week concerning a package of gun control bills emotionally endorsed by Gov. Ed Rendell.

Unofficially, the count was about 1,000 to 10, with the gun-rights lobby winning that grassroots campaign just as it succeeded in rebuffing Mr. Rendell’s efforts to sway the House Judiciary Committee.

Did I ever mention I love Pennsylvania gun owners? We beat them 100 to friggin one! That’s how to get things done. Frankel goes on to say:

“There’s no political penalty for those that don’t support [gun control] measures, but there is a political penalty if they do,” Mr. Frankel said of the impressive political activism that continues on behalf of sportsmen and other gun owners in Pennsylvania.

That’s exactly what Ed Rendell fails to understand. Polls don’t matter. What matters is we’ll turn out to vote for the other guy if you vote to screw us. The people that you polled barely understood the issue, and won’t be pulling a lever based on it anyway.

“We know based on independent polling that most Pennsylvanians support stronger gun control laws,” he said. “The question is where on those persons’ priority list of issues does gun safety rank, as opposed to where on the list of the gun advocates. … The other side are single-issue voters and that carries a lot of weight.”

Yes, it does. I have said before I’m not always a single issue voter, but gun rights ranks very high on my political calculus, because it tells me an awful lot about how a certain politician views his relationship with those that he governs, and his respect for limits being placed on governmental power. The gun issue is a great litmus test for how much a political candidate cares about liberty.

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” Mr. Rendell said. “We are not going to go away.”

Yes, it is, and we have a lot more endurance than your folks do, Governor. Do you really want to start this political fight? Because I promise you, we’re very interested in finishing it, and not on terms you are going to like.

In addition to the vigilant NRA, which on its national Web site immediately posted information about the House Judiciary Committee’s votes and each committee member’s position on them, a newer coalition of smaller gun-rights organizations adds to the effectiveness of the gun-rights lobby. They banded together two years ago to win legislative compromise on how gun owners would be affected by a new law concerning protection-from-abuse orders, and were also active on last week’s votes.

“We are more organized now than we’ve ever been in Pennsylvania,” said Kim Stolfer, legislative committee chairman of the Allegheny County Sportsmen’s League, which is part of the coalition.

I doubt this was the effect the Governor was predicting he would have.

Jeff Soyer points to a pretty good editorial in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.  I agree with the editorial that one-gun-a-month and weakening preemption are unconstitutional on their face.   I’m not sure the “Lost and Stolen” bill is, even though I think it’s still bad public policy, and shouldn’t be passed into law.  My reasoning is that it’s a regulatory requirement rather than a restraint on anyone’s ability to possess, carry, buy, lend or sell a firearm.  The state conceivably has the power to require reporting of a lost or stolen gun under it’s powers to control it’s militia.  Nonetheless, the point is a good one:

If a majority of Pennsylvanians deem it necessary to enact Rendell-like gun controls, wouldn’t they agree to amend Article I, Section 21? What those of Rendell’s ilk fear — and why such constitutional end-runs are so routinely pressed — is that a majority of Pennsylvanians likely don’t support such schemes.

I don’t see any serious movement in this direction in Pennsylvania.  But then again, if you can just get judges to render the right meaningless, why bother doing it the hard way?

Geekwitha.45 and EgregiousCharles actually went to Harrisburg to help stick it to Rendell personally. He relays to us why HB 29, the lost and stolen gun reporting requirement, is a bad idea, and also relays some of the substance of questioned that were asked about the bill.