Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Pennsylvania is in a bit of a crisis. You see, cities like Pittsburgh are trying to pass their own gun control ordinances and completely ignore that the state has a preemption measure as part of state law. That means Pittsburgh’s efforts are illegal, yet they’re still trying to push it.
Now Philadelphia wants to get in on the action with its own gun control. It already has a measure on the books where they penalize anyone who doesn’t report a firearm as lost or stolen, but it’s only been enforced once, so there’s little ground for anyone to have standing to file suit against the city.
Yet Philly politicians aren’t satisfied. They want more gun control, and they’re passing it and hoping the state will let it stand.
Philadelphia City Council approved legislation Thursday to ban guns from local parks and recreation centers, following a series of high-profile shootings in public spaces last summer. But like previous gun control efforts by Philadelphia officials, the law is unlikely to be enforced because state legislation needed to authorize the city’s ban has stalled in Harrisburg.
“You’ve got to hope they realize the importance of saving children and families at recreational centers and playgrounds,” Council President Darrell L. Clarke, who championed the bill, said of the Republican-controlled legislature. “If they can’t see the wisdom in that, then heaven help us.”
The Pennsylvania bill, which was authored by State Rep. Donna Bullock (D., Phila.), has been sitting in the House Judiciary Committee since August. The panel is chaired by State Rep. Rob Kauffman (R., Franklin), a strong supporter of gun rights.
The problem is that the law is not only illegal, but it’s useless.
While Mr. Clarke may well be speaking from the heart, he’s also speaking from a place of naive ignorance. The people who represent the problem in Philadelphia aren’t the law-abiding citizens who respect the rules of where they can and can’t carry. The problem rests with a criminal underclass who simply refuse to adhere to any rules or regulations they don’t want to.
Those are the people who are turning parts of Philadelphia into a warzone. Those are the ones responsible for police standoffs. Those are the ones shooting children with indiscriminate gunfire.
People like that aren’t going to respect a rule banning guns in certain areas. They never have and they never will. After all, most of them are convicted felons who aren’t lawfully allowed to have a firearm anyway, yet they do.
If they’ll ignore federal gun control laws, why on Earth would you assume they’d follow local ordinances?
Well, for the average Bearing Arms reader, you wouldn’t. You’d understand that gun control laws are invariably ignored by criminals as a matter of course, that new rules simply mean new measures for the bad guys to ignore.
That’s not likely to change with yet another anti-gun rule on the books.
I get wanting to protect your kids. I get it. What parent wouldn’t? What decent adult wouldn’t?
This isn’t even close to how you accomplish it, though, and it will be the good people in bad neighborhoods who end up paying the price for the well-intentioned and completely ineffective laws pushed by their elected officials.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/
https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2019/11/23/philadelphia-attempts-ban-guns-public-parks/