Several of the candidates mentioned in this article would be a disaster for us. Dan McCaffery has the backing of Bob Brady, meaning he’s cozy with the Philadelphia political machine who are no friends of ours. Lynne Abraham was not friendly to gun rights during her tenure as District Attorney for the City of Philadelphia, and Patrick Murphy’s gun control credentials have been well documented here.
The only unknown is Kathleen Granhan Kane, who was a prosecutor in Clarks Summit, near Scranton. I have no idea what her position is on Second Amendment issues. Considering how high profile the Attorney General is, and the amount of policy under that office’s control, it’s important that we keep that in pro-2A hands. So far the Democratic contenders do not impress me. We’re fortunate that since the Attorney General has been subject to popular election (by the Attorney General Act in 1980) that office has never been held by a Democrat. But we should not take anything for granted. The office is too important.
The state AG is a big deal for us non-PA types who visit the state with non-PA non-resident concealed handgun permits issued by Florida and Virginia. I just read the Philly City Council transcripts from Dec 2010 when they discussed their now recently enacted law banning recognition of non-resident carry permits from those states. The Council cited some sort of PA AG ‘finding’ that those states did not have permit laws ‘comparable’ to PA’s laws, but a few other states like Colorado and Utah did. And so Philly now says that only PA permits and resident permits from those few states would be recognized by Philly. I have no idea what ‘finding’ they were talking about, but I can see a friendly AG making my life miserable by backing up the City Council.
Yes. Everything points to the anti-gunners primary goal being ending preemption in Pennsylvania, more than anything, and a hostile Attorney General would be able to do a tremendous amount of damage in that regard, by giving sanction to local communities to flout it. It was very helpful to have Corbett’s office issuing statements that local communities were preempted. It put our opponents on the other side of the AG’s office, which is where I like them to be.
And yes, certainly a lot of damage can be done monkeying with reciprocity agreements, but at least the legislature has created an affirmative duty for the PA AG to sign agreements. We’d have some tools at our disposal in that fight. But I’m not sure how good that is in the face of a hostile AG. We’d have to go to the legislature, and probably get blanket recognition of other states to preserve many of the agreements.
Maybe we should all ask GunLawyer at PAFOA to run.