Year: 2007

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?