The city of Philadelphia tried to enact gun control. They weren’t the first city in Pennsylvania to try it–or, more accurately, at least, to try to enforce it–but they might well be the last.
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That’s because the State Supreme Court smacked them down while upholding preemption with a 6-0 vote.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are disappointed by this. In particular, gun control advocates are upset.
Safety advocates expressed disappointment after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court unanimously upheld state laws that prevent local governments from enacting their own gun-control measures.
Wednesday’s ruling ends a lawsuit filed by the city of Philadelphia, anti-gun violence group CeaseFirePA, and Black and Hispanic residents of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh who argued that the state laws were unconstitutional and directly harmed communities affected by gun violence. The lawsuit failed to show the laws were unconstitutional, the court ruled.
Chuck Horton, a gunshot survivor and anti-violence advocate, told WHYY News that the violence infiltrating communities is devastating the futures of families on multiple levels. Without creative thinking on ways to combat the destruction that guns are having on cities, he said, lives and cultures will be lost forever.
“Yes, in some parts of our communities, guns are used for hunting to feed our families,” Horton said. “However, in our inner cities, guns are used to kill, maim, and destroy — and these three things happen on both sides of the gun.
“When a person pulls a trigger, they are destroying their future, creating an atmosphere of retaliation for their actions, and maybe a lifetime of incarceration.”
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First, if the media wants me to believe they’re not biased, they need to stop calling these people “safety advocates.” They’re not. They’re gun control activists.
Second, I get that Horton is a gunshot survivor and he’s not wrong that some people misuse firearms. He’s not even wrong about how they tend to be misused in cities.
Yet my point here is, so what?
Look, I’m not dismissing the issue of violent crime. My point is that we know these guns aren’t legally obtained. We also know that local laws are going to be misdemeanors. That means they’re punishable by no more than a year in prison and/or a fine.
A fine just means “legal for a price” and if people aren’t worried about the penalties for killing someone, do you think they’re going to blink at a year in lock-up? Not really.
Moreover, all of this idea of local gun control is really just the result of local officials trying to pretend they’re doing something about violent crime without having to do anything about violent crime. They can bellyache about guns and try to restrict the right to keep and bear arms for law-abiding people, then when it doesn’t work, they can say the problem was that they didn’t go far enough. It’s an ever-moving goalpost.
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Now, though, the court did them a favor.
See, now they can keep blaming the guns and just say, “Hey, we tried, you know, but the State Supreme Court smacked our pee-pee, so we can’t do anything, which means it’s on the state.” It lets them kick it down the road, which is what they’d prefer to do anyway.
