proposed laws

PA Bill Number: HB777

Title: In firearms and other dangerous articles, further providing for definitions and providing for the offense of sale of firearm or firearm parts without ...

Description: In firearms and other dangerous articles, further providing for definitions and providing for the offense of sale of firearm or firearm parts without ...

Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (104-97)

Last Action Date: Mar 27, 2024

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FOAC's Weekly Message For Sunday December 30th 2018 :: 12/30/2018

As we welcome in the new year, 2019, I would ask all of you to consider what we experienced in 2018 and use that as a benchmark for what is to come in the next two-year session of Congress and the state legislature!

Within the path ahead lie both challenges and opportunities.

Anti-gun and leftist billionaires played an outsized role in the gun control debate and in the November elections here in Pennsylvania and in Congress. They and the rabid activists they agitated will be demanding a return on their investments.

Michael Bloomberg funneled tens of millions of dollars into the election through his Everytown gun control empire. Their investment strategy wasn’t just aimed at tipping close races. They also invested in contests that likely would have gone the same way without their money; all to create a false impression that gun control is part of an emerging political mandate.

Either way, the recipients of their largesse, including $500,000 to Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf and city officials in Pittsburgh, are now burdened with the obligation to pursue gun control. And if they can’t do it by passing legislation, they will do it by partnering with industry, finance, media, and cultural elites in entertainment and academia to try to demonize and marginalize gun owners and the businesses that serve them. Look for more coordinated attacks on the 2nd Amendment through Operation Choke Point type financial divestment schemes, as well as a steady drumbeat of anti-gun messaging in movies, television, educational materials, pop music and sports.

Make no mistake, anti-gun bills are being drafted to be immediately sprung upon the public in the aftermath of any exploitable tragedy. Today’s unpredictable, crisis-driven, and largely online public discourse can quickly create enormous momentum behind ill-conceived efforts before rational thought has a chance to intercede. Gun control activists count on this and will be biding their time to unleash their campaigns whenever possible.

To further demonstrate the chattering DC classes are already speculating about the Democrats’ plans to subpoena Trump’s tax records and Senate Republicans’ moves to consolidate their hold of the federal judiciary. But amid the DC gossip, a new threat is being overlooked—red flag gun confiscation orders.

The Guardian detailed House Democrats’ desire to pass gun control legislation in the upcoming Congress:

“Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida who represents Parkland, where a February school shooting left 17 dead, said this week that he expected House Democrats to focus on bills with more bipartisan support. Those measures included bump stock bans and “extreme risk protection orders”, also known as red flag laws, which give law enforcement and family members a way to petition a court to temporarily bar an unstable person from buying or owning guns.”

With the cries for gun control growing stronger, the federal government may finally give in to public pressure to “do something.” Red flag laws might just be the “come together” moment establishment politicians have been looking for.

Red Flag Laws Are an Insult to A Constitutional Republic and Violate the Basic Tenants of Due Process and Innocent Until Proven Guilty Standards Within the American Judicial System

Red flag laws or Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are the euphemistic label for the gun control push Du Jure blazing across the nation. Under red flag laws, law enforcement has the ability to confiscate an individual’s firearms who is deemed a threat to themselves or others. A simple accusation from a family member, friend, or associate will suffice to seize someone’s firearms.

These laws, mind you, operate in complete violation of due process. Individuals cannot take their accusers to court, even though the defendant in question has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. Additionally, the defendant’s firearms would be confiscated without even so much as a hearing before a judge. It could take months before a gun owner would have to appear in court to win back his gun rights.

Thirteen states currently have red flag laws on the books, with dozens more filing their own versions. What started out as a state-level movement may have some legs at the federal level. Although it’s true that Congressional Democrats are making gun control a major theme of their legislative agenda, it’s naïve to think red flag laws are only relevant because of “gun-grabbing” Democrats have taken power.

As we’ll see below, red flag laws have a history of bipartisan support. And when any piece of legislation has Democrats and Republicans locking arms in agreement, you know trouble lies ahead.

Let’s take a Look Where Prominent National Republican stand on Red Flag laws

Despite campaign rhetoric, a significant portion of Republican politicians will change colors on gun rights once in DC. Several GOP members in the upcoming Congress stick out like a sore thumb when it comes to their gun control advocacy:

Lindsay Graham:  The South Carolina Senator already introduced a red flag bill earlier this year. With the 116th Congress right around the corner, Graham will likely reach across the aisle with Democrat colleagues to move red flag legislation forward. Graham has opined that red flag legislation is the “place where we begin a long-overdue discussion about firearms and mental health. But we must start.”

Marco Rubio: Following the Parkland shootings, Rubio joined the gun control chorus by sponsoring a red flag bill along with Democrat Senators Joe Manchin, Bill Nelson, & Jack Reed. Rubio has even flirted with the idea of regulations on magazines, raising the minimum age to buy certain firearms like AR-15s, and tweaking the current background check system.

Mitt Romney: The incoming Utah Senator has an anti-gun record as Governor of Massachusetts. As Governor, Romney signed an assault weapons ban into law in 2004. In political fashion, Romney obscured his anti-gun act by turning to pro-2nd Amendment platitudes during both of his presidential runs in 2008 and 2012. In a 2007 statement, Romney expressed that he does not “support any new gun laws including any new ban on semi-automatic firearms.” Nevertheless, the fallout from the recent Parkland shooting has made Romney reconsider the validity of enhanced background checks.

Rick Scott: Former Governor of Florida and Florida’s new Senator, Rick Scott poses an interesting threat to gun rights. Despite his ostensibly pro-gun rhetoric, Scott signed SB 7026 Florida’s most expansive gun control measure in recent history. Pressured by the outrage from the Parkland School shooting, Scott’s SB 7026 contains red flag provisions, raises the age to buy a firearm to 21, and imposes a three-day waiting period for all firearms purchases.

Trump Administration: Even the Executive branch is joining in on the red flag craze after the NRA signed off on supporting Red Flag Laws. The Trump Administration’s Commission on School Safety recently released a report recommending red flag laws as a means to “address school safety and violence.” It’s only a matter of time before legislation is introduced in either chamber of Congress now that the Trump administration has endorsed red flag laws.

Even Larry Hogan, the Republican Governor of Maryland, kowtowed to anti-gun pressure. On April 24, 2018, Hogan signed a series of gun bills, one which included a red flag law. In October, the first month Maryland’s red flag law went into effect, there were 114 requests to confiscate individuals’ firearms.

Maryland’s red flag law has not been without its fair share of controversy. At 5 a.m on Monday, November 5, two police officers came knocking on 61-year-old Gary Willis’ door to serve him a court order mandating that he turn over his guns. What seemed like a typical court order, quickly turned deadly as one of the cops shot and killed Willis in a struggle that ensued. Quick to defend one of his own, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare defended the cops’ action by callously claiming that they “did the best they could with the situation they had.”

Anti-Gun Ideology is Growing

The tragic incident in Maryland is an ominous sign of what is to come should red flag laws gain more traction.

Whether or not Republicans will support Congressional iterations of Red Flag laws is anyone’s guess. The bigger problem at hand is an ideological one. When society’s ideological compass is off, government transgressions can come at any time. The passage of red flag laws could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

More than a century’s worth of Progressivism has normalized universalist ideas such as economic controls, big spending, never-ending wars, and now, gun control. Misguided conservatives can debate ad infinitum on the forums or their talk radio shows about how certain Republicans “sell out” or betray their movement.

This, however, ignores how selling out—rubber stamping big government, embracing globalism, and embarking on nation-building—has been the standard operating procedure for many conservatives throughout the last century. Gun rights will be no different.

Other Issues on the Horizon

In the land of the free(?), incoming anti-2nd Amendment Democrats have already drafted a bill that will criminalize private gun sales.  As a “law-abiding and ‘free’” American, you will no longer be able to sell your own property without the government’s permission, unless you want to be labeled as a criminal should this bill succeed and become law.

While this won’t prevent mass shootings, as a government study conducted by anti-gun lunatics in politically elite positions already discovered, a very vast majority of gun owners regulate themselves.

Gun-hating democrats who demanded a study into the sale of guns online were smacked with a dose of reality. They wasted two years attempting to buy guns illegally on the “dark web,” and the group of Democrats failed every single time.

Senator Elizabeth Warren joined with Senator Brian Schultz, D-Hawaii, and Representative Elijah Cummings, D-Md., to commission the GAO report.

An embarrassing attempt to try to regulate guns further went horribly wrong when Democrats took it upon themselves to try to skirt the law to prove it can be done. Over the course of the two-and-a-half year investigation, agents tried to buy firearms illegally on the “Surface Web” and the “Dark Web,” generally by sharing their status as “prohibited individuals” or trying to buy across state lines.

According to Breitbart, under the Democrats’ plan, a background system like that in California would require a gun seller to seek government permission for any sale or transfer of a firearm. Such a system was put in place in California in the early 1990s and has failed to prevent some of our nation’s most heinous mass public attacks. Meaning this bill is not about “curbing gun violence,” it’s about controlling the tax cattle.

But the GAO revealed that every single one of their [Democrats who tried to buy guns privately] 72 attempts outside of the “dark web” were “unsuccessful.” It kind of makes one wonder where Bloomberg got his information and statistics. As if that isn’t bad enough, to humiliate those in power who think of us as less equal than them, the bulk of this rather embarrassing study is being ignored by the mainstream media.

“Private sellers on Surface Web gun forums and in classified ads were unwilling to sell a firearm to our agents that self-identified as being prohibited from possessing a firearm,” the GAO reported, noting that in their “72 attempts … 56 sellers refused to complete a transaction once we revealed that either the shipping address was across state lines or that we were prohibited by law from owning firearms.” In the other cases, the investigators’ website was frozen or they encountered suspected scammers.

Nevertheless, Thompson expects to push his gun control bill within “the first 100 days” of the new Congress, Breitbart reported further. Incoming House Judiciary Committee chairman Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has already assured his colleagues that he will move the bill “very quickly” once it is introduced.

The fact is that soon many of the newly elected Congressional representatives will swear an oath where in they will knowingly violate this oath in the upcoming session by supporting restrictions on a right that is not supposed to be infringed! The items we have outlined above are but a fraction of what is being considered in Congress and it behooves all of us to consider just exactly how far they are prepared to go! Many say that these plans for disarming Americans are nothing more than wild paranoia and unfounded speculation. Yet then we should ask ourselves if that is true then why are members of our military being surveyed as to whether or not they would shoot Americans whom they are disarming! See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-APgs165w0

21st Century Social Outcasts - Gun Owners; the Movement to Stigmatize Citizen’s Rights

The movement, propagated and funded by amoral billionaire Socialists/Marxists, to marginalize American gun owners continues to recruit the finance industry aggressively.

Their apparent goal is to stigmatize gun owners, so that we occupy the lowest possible status-rung in American society.

In a recent NYT editorial, the author implores the banking and credit-card industries to treat all who would legally purchase guns, ammunition, and virtually all accessories like diseased outcasts.

Accordingly, leftists want all “suspicious” firearms transactions “flagged,” not by BATF, but by banks and credit-card companies, so that names of persons thus identified will, without their knowledge, go on a “List.” They want the finance industry to start “informing” on gun owners. (Hitler would be proud!)

What makes a gun-purchaser “suspicious?”

Of course, to leftists, all private gun purchasers are “suspicious,” and all would-be gun owners thus need to be “investigated,” and their names put on the “List” mentioned above.

They want to make the entire finance industry so frightened to have anything to do with us, that eventually all private gun owners will be unable to transact business, followed by retailers, creditors, and manufacturers.

In NYS, several state-level politicians (at this point all Democrats) are proposing that a person’s social-media record be “inspected” before he can purchase a gun or ammunition. When asked what in a person’s social media would represent a “red flag,” they are unable to answer.

They want to have the ability to arbitrarily prevent political opponents from buying guns, while they themselves are never required to articulate any legitimate rationale persuasively.

NY’s governor has already stated publicly that non-liberals are unwelcome in his state. Presumably, that includes gun owners.

After the first of the year, we’ll see this movement accelerate, to the cheers and unconditional support of the liberal media. As always, 2nd Amendment supporters will find it nearly impossible to find a microphone. Big retailers will continue to be put under enormous pressure to stop selling guns and ammunition.

Dick’s and some others have already caved. Dick’s, for one, is paying a terrible price in lost business as a result. I’m fresh out of sympathy!

“Common-sense” restrictions on our liberty, particularly when leftists dishonestly insist that they only want to ban “certain types” of guns, (from us, never themselves), will, without delay, morph into a ban on all guns, as it has in the UK, with the concordant increase in violent crime.

Arguments to the contrary only serve to insult our intelligence.

When Marxists (masquerading as “liberals”) can’t “legislate” our freedom away, they will try to “regulate” it away, or as noted above, “intimidate” it away.

It, also, necessarily follows that these formally proud citizens of our Republic, now pitiable emasculated liars, must be forcibly disarmed!

House Democrats and the Upcoming Battle for the 2nd Amendment in Congress

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi “vows to fight” for “bipartisan, common sense” gun control and announced gun control “will be a priority” even before she had secured the Speaker’s gavel. The eagerness to curtail Constitutional rights isn’t limited to Nancy Pelosi; Representative Mike Thompson, head of the Democrats’ “gun violence prevention task force” and incoming Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Representative Jerry Nadler are both on record confirming they’ll push gun control early next year.

As soon as they’re in power.

They claim that it’s what the American people want. So, is it?

According to a Gallup poll conducted earlier this month, gun control and guns rank at the very bottom of the list of what adults say is the country’s top problem – coming in at three percent.

That’s tied with the economy in general, unemployment, and ethical/moral/religious decline. Only slightly behind crime and violence (4%), and about half as highly ranked as several categories of social issues including race relations, poverty and homelessness, and healthcare.

The top two problems facing the country, according to adults nationwide, are government (19%) and immigration (16%). Both issues fall under the purview of Congress and yet the next Speaker of the House couldn’t announce the new majority’s intentions quickly enough despite a complete lack of evidence that so-called “universal” background checks will have an effect on crime. In fact, readers may recall one study, lauded by anti-gun organizations and talking heads, actually found that background checks are associated with an increase in homicides.

Of course, the model in that study was mis-specified but that hasn’t stopped anti-gunners from using it to push their agenda.

In looking at Gallup data for this year, guns and gun control was cited by only 1% of adults as the most important problem facing the country in October of this year. That number doubled all the way to 2% in November, and the midterm election was right in the middle of the November survey period. Gallup has asked the most important problem question monthly and shared the results from June 2018 onward, and gun control has never been higher than 4% (June 2018).

The top two specific problems every month since early summer have been the government and immigration.  Lest you believe that this is somehow unique to Gallup, let’s take a look at some other polling data.

A Marist Poll conducted from November 28th through December 4th of this year found that 8% of registered voters said guns should be the top priority for the next Congress.  Immigration was the top issue (18%), followed by the economy and jobs (17%) and health care (17%). Guns weren’t even the top issue for Democrats, coming in tied for third with climate change. Health care (24%) and the economy and jobs (16%) were ahead. Six percent of Independents think guns should be the top priority, well behind the economy and jobs (18%), health care (17%), immigration (15%), federal taxes and spending (14%), opioid addiction (12%), and climate change (9%).

Suburban adults put four issues before guns. This probably sounds repetitive, but maybe eventually Representative Pelosi will align her priorities with the American people instead of their billionaire buddies and Hollywood elites.

Isn’t it TIME That the 2nd Amendment is Promoted In Philadelphia and ALL Urban Areas?

While the suburbs could be decisive for the future of the 2nd Amendment, urban areas may be prime locations for pro-2A efforts.

When we talk about the future of the 2nd Amendment, it is correct to note that the suburbs could be decisive. But there is another area which could be an even greater opportunity for 2nd Amendment supporters to make gains – and which could help offset any gains made by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other anti-2nd Amendment extremists.

That place? Chicago.

Well, to be honest, we’re not just talking Chicago. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles, New Orleans. Just about any major urban center of the United States is very ripe for 2nd Amendment supporters. It may be the most significant vulnerability Bloomberg has.

Here’s why: Many of the major cities have crime problems. Chicago and Baltimore have notoriously high murder rates. Both towns also tend to tilt state-wide races in favor of candidates who oppose our right to keep and bear arms. Philadelphia, while not as notorious, has had 333 murders as of December 18 of this year, higher than Baltimore’s total of 298 so far.

Violent crime is one issue that 2nd Amendment supporters need to address. While the mass shootings draw media attention, most murders happen one at a time, to say nothing of other violent crimes. Guess who the high rate of violent crime in those cities is blamed on? Not the politicians who have presided over the decline of great cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago. It is law-abiding Americans who support the 2nd Amendment who get the blame.

The good news is that we know what works. You get tough on the violent criminals and put them away for a long time. When you look at 18 USC 924, there are some provisions that are so rarely used, it should be scandalous. Caught with a gun while dealing drugs? That’s a five-year mandatory minimum under 18 USC 924(c). For a career criminal (three violent felony or drug-related convictions) caught with a gun, 18 USC 924(e) provides for a 15-year mandatory minimum.

Now, here’s some bad news for many of those politicians.

The constant rate of violent crime and these scandalously underused tools can be an opening. The conditions have gone on for decades, and 2nd Amendment supporters have the example of how enforcing the laws can work in Project Exile’s implementation in Richmond, Virginia.

One of the signature cases involved Melvin Smith, who was busted with crack cocaine, a sawed-off shotgun, and a handgun. According to the New York Times, Smith got a 16-year sentence after the federal convictions and went to an out-of-state federal prison. He did have to come back to Richmond, where he was to face trial for six murders. The crime rate, notably murders, dropped.

A number of these politicians will oppose this – crying about incarceration rates. Well, here is a chance to turn Bloomberg’s rhetoric back on him. By fighting for a nation-wide version of Project Exile, the politicians who oppose it will have the blood of children on their hands.

While Project Exile is not universally beloved among 2nd Amendment supporters, it could be the key to opening up urban residents to pro-2nd Amendment arguments. Once the inaction of the politicians who have let urban areas fester for decades has been shown, it may be possible to earn the votes of those residents.

After all, what is there to lose with this effort if all we accomplish is lower crime?

Important Videos: Red Flag Laws – WHO Supports This Insanity??????

  • NRA Statement on Red Flag Laws

https://foac-pac.org/Videos/26

  • Georgia Gun Owners, Iowa Gun Owners, Ohio Gun Owners, Minnesota Gun Owners: NRA Exposed Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBMJD2wy3u4&t=20s

  • Why is the American Military Being Asked About Disarming Americans?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-APgs165w0

Important Quote: "The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once." Justice Alex Kozinski, US 9th Circuit Court, 2003 - Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567

As we close out 2018 and celebrate the beginning of the New Year we, the officers of FOAC, want to wish you and your family all the best for 2019! The defense of our right to bear arms would not have been possible without all of your hard work and support and we hope that you will continue to join with us as we work together to make sure we protect our heritage of freedom!

Yours in Freedom!

Kim Stolfer, President