PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Background checks won't halt shootings :: 01/07/2016
In their final months in office, presidents typically focus on building a legacy. One way President Obama is doing that is by tightening federal gun laws. While wiping back tears in a Tuesday speech from the White House, he announced several executive actions he claimed would reduce gun crimes, in particular, the kinds of mass shootings seen in San Bernardino on Dec. 2.
Yet as a former federal judge, Andrew Napolitano, pointed out on FoxNews.com, “Congress has expressly removed occasional sales (sales not made by full-time dealers) from the obligation of obtaining federal licenses and from conducting background checks.” Mr. Obama’s attempt to mandate such checks “will be invalidated by the courts,” he predicted.
Whatever happens at the federal level, such checks already are mandated by the state of California. Yet that law did nothing to prevent the massacre at the Inland Regional Center.
Aside from completely banning guns, it’s hard to see how tighter federal or state gun laws would have prevented that tragedy because the primary plotter, Syed Farook – who allegedly got his guns through an illegal straw purchase – was born in Chicago, had nothing in his background to block gun ownership and even worked for the government as a health inspector for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.
The state gun-control initiative slated for this November’s ballot includes measures, such as background checks for buying ammo, that also would not have affected the San Bernardino shooting. It is unfortuate that politicians are using such tragedies to advance an agenda that reduces Americans’ Second Amendment right to self-defense with firearms.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/federal-698810-gun-checks.html
