More Preemption Fights

Philadelphia wants to be able to ban guns at city rec centers. How often have you guys had problems with people who are licensed? Which you need to be to carry a gun on the streets in Philadelphia.

Council president Darrell Clarke says after two mass shootings at city playgrounds in a month, they have to try.

LTCF holders, right? If not, you can file gun charges on top of murder already. What’s the purpose of restricting the law abiding LTC holders?

It’s almost as if this has absolutely nothing to do with combatting crime.

15 thoughts on “More Preemption Fights”

  1. Yet another law that will have done nothing to prevent what it was meant to prevent.

    1. It’s meant to prevent law abiding citizens from protecting themselves and will succeed at that.

    1. Even simpler. They are just looking out for their constituents.

      With the politicized left leaning PA courts the blue areas must smell blood in the water. Or at least they know they can virtue signal on the public dime and force their political and cultural opponents to spend on defense.

  2. When I lived in Penn. I found Philly to be so damn dangerous that I would not want to go into the city without carrying concealed. I hope Penn. slaps down Philly’s attempt yet again to get around the state constitution.

    1. “I found Philly to be so damn dangerous that I would not want to go into the city without carrying concealed.”

      Another of my Old Stories:

      I worked in Philly for years. I started carrying after one night engaging a (potential) mugger with only a tin letter opener I’d had the foresight to grab off our secretary’s desk before heading for the train station hours after dark. It would have been almost useless as a weapon, but was long-bladed and shiny and looked real threatening under the streetlights, I guess. The guy backed off.

      One night at an after work function one of my loudmouthed buddies told someone I was carrying, and the word spread like wildfire. The general reaction was “Oh, that’s terrible, and it proves he’s some kind of nut.” But the at the end of the evening all the people who were most offended asked me to walk them to their cars.

      Those stories told, I also have to say that I had an acquaintance who claimed to have been in two shooting scrapes in Philadelphia, that had involved exchanging fire with armed assailants; but a cop acquaintance opined that any civilian who had experienced two shooting incidents, probably had gone looking for trouble. But, I’m just reporting.

      1. When it comes to “looking for trouble”, sometimes a person has no interest in trouble, but trouble is looking for you.

        And as much as people might suggest otherwise, clearly the ones offended that you were carrying a gun, who later asked you to be their escort, understands this, if only subconsciously.

    2. Some of the shadiest places I’ve been in or lived at throughout my life — downtown Albany, NY, or certain neighborhoods in Birmingham, England, are two that immediately come to mind — are places where it’s difficult, if not impossible, for peaceable citizens to carry weapons.

      I do not consider that a coincidence.

      1. “Some of the shadiest places I’ve been in or lived at throughout my life. . . are places where it’s difficult, if not impossible, for peaceable citizens to carry weapons.”

        True, but part of the problem is that “civilized” people often don’t carry weapons even when they have the option readily available and the danger of attack is high and undeniable.

        In terms of “undeniable”, in the time-frame I described, one of our women employees was beaten brutally and raped on our parking lot, one winter afternoon right around twilight. Lots of cars were still on the parking lot.

        At the time, 30th Street Station (a massive, busy edifice similar to Union Station in Washington, DC) was known as “one of the best places to get mugged in Philadelphia.” I had an incident there myself, that didn’t involve a confrontation, but I realized two guys had followed me up to an empty platform, and I had inadvertently avoided them by thinking better of things, and descending a different stairway.

        For those a little familiar with West Philly, I was still in graduate school at UPenn at night at the time, and would descend the staircase from Walnut Street to the parking lot by the Class of ’23 Skating Rink on the way back to my car. If I were filming another iteration of the movie Death Wish, I’d choose that spot for a scary location for an attack scene. Even when I was carrying, my bowels would loosen a bit on that staircase.

        Twenty years later while my son was a UPenn undergrad, a guy attacked a couple students nearby that location, but that guy was still lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood when the sun was high the next morning. No one had bothered to sweep him up yet. But, that incident did not involve firearms. Just a couple very unforgiving students.

    1. All “ideologies” and “causes” are equally guilty of believing in magic, and the RKBA movement has been as guilty as any other.

      Awhile back I told my Old Story about how at the age of 18, I stood before a local judge and pointed out that municipal ordinances like the one I had just been arrested under, had been declared unconstitutional by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court only months before — speaking of “preemption.” The judge’s reply was “Shut the fuck up, you’re guilty.”

      That was 55 years ago. Check the first sentence of Sebastian’s commentary.

      I had thought “law” had solved all of our problems regarding hunting in our township. I had believed in a kind of magic. I had been wrong. It had not been in local political or economic interests for the Supreme Court decision to have any effect, so it didn’t, in any practical way.

      Fast forward about thirty years, and I was being excoriated by Real Gunnies in Pennsylvania for predicting that the NRA-supported gun control legislation in our state, that clearly and explicitly banned the State Police from using its proposed “Pennsylvania Instant Check System” to maintain a firearms registry, would never see that provision enforced. Almost all RKBA advocates said, “But it will be the law!” How paranoid could one guy get, to believe that NRA-endorsed law would have no practical effect? Their belief in magic, rather than reality, led them to support gun control that was going to be the solution to allay all our fears about firearms record-keeping; a worthwhile tradeoff for other minor inconveniences.

      Now, does anyone remember what the State Supreme Court ruled when the question of the Pennsylvania State Polices’ ongoing firearms registry finally reached it?

      For a final embellishment of my point: Over the years I have had more than one acquaintance who was into the “Tax Protest” or “Tax Honesty” movements. All believed that reciting the magic incantations called “law”, just the right way, would cause the black-robed Keepers of The Truth to bow down before the indisputable force of their long and complex research. Some of them went to jail; none of them gained from their experience.

      So, now we tsk, tsk, tsk those silly liberals who believe a Gun Free Zone will have some practical effect on mass shooters? What’s that saying about “behold the plank in thy own eye?” Belief in magic is what underlies the belief that “It Can’t Happen Here.”

      Idiots, indeed.

      1. Here’s an even better example: All the people who think that making abortion illegal will stop abortions. On one end of the spectrum you have the people who want to make a statement opposing mass shootings by creating gun free zones. At the other end you have people who want to make a statement opposing abortion by making it illegal. Neither will accomplish anything “practical,” as you call it. They will die trying though.

        1. I do not think making abortion illegal will stop all abortions.

          It will reduce the number of them however.

          Just like making murdering born people does not stop all such killings, but does give us mechanisms to reduce them.

  3. “I do not think making abortion illegal will stop all abortions. It will reduce the number of them however.”

    Why do you say that? On what basis? Can you quantify that statement?

    It really isn’t my intent to debate the issue. My intent is to illustrate that you choose to believe in the efficacy of a policy you favor, on exactly the same basis as the people who who support gun free zones. They believe it is “obvious” that because some people will choose to obey the law, gun free zones will reduce shootings in those zones. Fewer guns, less shooting, seems obvious to them.

    Be aware that some people believe there were more abortions, when abortions were illegal. But because there are no official records of events that were illegal, they can’t prove that. They believe it based on what they’ve seen. They make arguments like, how many drug overdose deaths have been prevented by drugs being illegal? Maybe more deaths have occurred, because the drugs were illegal?

    Some of us offer the counter-argument against gun free zones, that they may encourage attacks because they assure that law-abiding people will not be armed to defend themselves in those zones. We suppose that is true, because it seems obvious to us. We say gun free zones may be causing more deaths than they’re preventing. But that is a similar argument in the claim that the illegality of abortions will result in mothers dying from “back alley” abortions, and that may more than offset the lives of babies saved.

    We all favor suppositions that support what we choose to believe. It’s a terrible basis for legislating anything at all. Guns or abortions. Yet everyone does it.

    Does the illegality of murder deter any murders at all? We think it does. But all we know for sure is it gives us a mechanism for punishing murder after the fact.

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