PA Bill Number: HB917
Title: Adopting the Uniform Family Law Arbitration Act.
Description: Adopting the Uniform Family Law Arbitration Act. ...
Last Action: Presented to the Governor
Last Action Date: Apr 29, 2024
Anti-Gun: Fritz Walker: State House rejects common-sense gun control provision :: 11/07/2014
Background checks are a common-sense safeguard [Editors Note: Really?] that require gun sellers to first check if a buyer is a convicted felon, domestic abuser or mentally incompetent, and therefore prohibited from purchasing firearms. By federal law, sales of all firearms by licensed gun dealers require background checks, but private sale regulations are left to the states.
In Pennsylvania, all handgun sales require background checks. But it's legal for a private seller to sell a long gun, including the semi-automatic, assault-style weapons used at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Ross Township, without conducting a background check. More than 90 percent of Pennsylvanians agree we should close this dangerous loophole. But that seems not to include the majority of Pennsylvania state House representatives, who continue to kowtow to the National Rifle Association.
A proposal with bipartisan support that would close this loophole was recently rejected as an amendment to House Bill 1243. It would simply have eliminated three lines that carve out an exception, based on the firearm's barrel length or total length, to Pennsylvania's background check law. Furthermore, it didn't affect the current legal right to transfer firearms to direct descendants without a background check.
The legislators serving the Lehigh Valley and nearby regions who voted against this common-sense protection of the public's safety were Justin Simmons, Ryan MacKenzie, Daniel McNeill, Joe Emrick, Marsha Hahn, Mario Scavello , Julie Harhart, Gary Day, and Rosemary Brown. Standing up to the gun lobby and voting yea: Michael Schlossberg, Steve Samuelson and Robert Freeman.
Can a vote against background checks really be justified? [Editors Note: The real question is "can a vote FOR background checks really be justified"] These are the basic arguments I've seen:
- It is already a crime to sell a long gun to prohibited persons. Gun-rights extremists advance this subterfuge frequently. It's not true. It's a crime to knowingly sell to a prohibited person. That's a huge difference — the very reason background checks are necessary.
- Background checks are a violation of Second Amendment constitutional rights. This is factually incorrect. That's not my opinion; it's the opinion of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority 2008 opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia that, for the first time, established an individual's right to possess a handgun in the home for one's protection. Scalia stated, "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." He then noted, "nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, … or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." In other words, a reasonable background check law is constitutional. And Pennsylvania's system is certainly reasonable. It usually takes less than 15 minutes, and 99.97 percent of Pennsylvanians live within 10 miles of a licensed firearms dealer who can conduct the check.
- Long guns are not a significant problem. While it's true that handguns are used more frequently in crimes, in Pennsylvania the percentage of gun murders committed with long guns has steadily increased since we instituted our background check for handguns. Long guns accounted for 26.2 percent of crime guns traced between 2010 and 2013. Police say Eric Frein recently used a .308 caliber rifle to allegedly kill one Pennsylvania state trooper and wound another. Since 2008, half of the gun murders of police in Pennsylvania were perpetrated with long guns. The Navy Yard mass murderer of 2013 used a shotgun. And when Pennsylvania passed our background check law with an exemption for long guns, semiautomatic assault weapon sales were banned under a federal law that expired in 2004.
- Background checks are ineffective. To the contrary, background checks nationwide have blocked more than 2 million firearms purchases by prohibited persons. Missouri's repeal of its private-sale background check law in 2007 resulted in a 23 percent increase in gun homicide rates, as shown by firearms policy expert Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University. Naturally, background checks would be even more effective if there weren't so many loopholes; 33 states don't require background checks for any private sales, including handguns.
- Granting any gun restriction, no matter how reasonable, is the first step on the slippery slope to the confiscation of all our guns. This argument is seen repeatedly throughout the extreme gun-rights world. It's paranoid nonsense. We have a Second Amendment.
In voting against closing this loophole, our representatives voted against public safety. As conservative U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey said: Background checks are not gun control; they're common sense.
Fritz Walker of South Whitehall Township is the Pennsylvania gun violence prevention lead for Organizing for Action, the Lehigh Valley Team lead for Everytown for Gun Safety, and a member of the board of directors of CeaseFirePA.
http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-gun-background-checks-yv-1107-20141106-story.html
