PA Bill Number: HB1472
Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...
Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...
Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT
Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024
FOAC's Weekly Message For Sunday May 5th 2019 :: 05/05/2019
Tomorrow the 2019 2nd Amendment Freedom Rally begins at 10 a.m. in Harrisburg. Hopefully PA gun owners will turn out in huge numbers to make a statement to PA Legislators that we will NOT tolerate more violations of our Rights under the PA Constitution!
Two more important pieces of legislation have been introduced in advance of the Rally; one by Rep. Bernstine – Constitutional Carry (HB 1412) – and another by Rep. Jim Marshall – Eliminate PA Gun Owner Registry (HB 1416). Please take a moment to thank ‘both’ of these courageous legislators!
Hopefully you can join us on Monday as we celebrate Freedom! However, if you cannot please consider signing and sharing the petition in support of our rally and our Freedoms so we can send the strongest possible message to all of Harrisburg, especially leadership of both Houses and, who knows, IF it is loud enough maybe even our anti-gun Governor will hear our voices! The Online petition link is below.
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/2019-pennsylvania-right-to-keep-and-bear-arms
Thank you for everything all of you have done to help us get to this point! Also, many thanks to ALL the volunteers who helped organize this event across PA!
WHY Does the National Media IGNORE Self-Defense Stories??? Intentional? YOU Decide!
Did you hear about this case? A man went into a dentist’s office, killed a woman, and took aim at others before being wounded by a concealed handgun permit holder. “He raised a gun to shoot me,” said dental hygienist Sabrina Steal.
Even the killer called the permit holder a “hero.” “You all wouldn’t be dealing with me right now if the hero hadn’t stepped in,” he told police after the attack. Sullivan County Sheriff Jeff Cassidy used the same word, perhaps with greater sincerity: “He was a concealed carry permit holder and I’m going to call him a hero today.”
But unless you live in the very Eastern tip of Tennessee, there is no way that you would have heard this story from February. If the permit holder hadn’t been there and many people had been shot, the story would have surely made national headlines.
If people heard more stories like this one, they might get some sense of just how often lives are saved by defensive gun uses.
Here's another one. Last fall, a masked man immediately opened fire as he entered a McDonald’s restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama. He had shot more than 15 rounds before a permit holder fatally shot him.
“He’s my hero,” said McDonald’s employee Markus Washington. “Because I can only imagine how it would’ve went if he wasn’t armed. We might not be here having this interview.”
Even in the extremely rare event that the national news media covers an attack which was stopped by a permit holder, that critical part of the story gets left out. Only the local news media got the story right when, last October, a concealed handgun permit holder stopped a racist attacker who was shooting blacks at a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky.
National media outlets such as ABC, CNN, and NBC noted that the alleged gunman told another white man: “Whites don’t kill whites.” It sounded as if the gunman was merely reassuring a bystander. But that bystander was a permit holder who was pointing a gun at the killer. What the killer actually said was: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”
The local media in the Louisville area got the story right, yet somehow the national media, which relied on the local media for their own reporting, got the story completely backwards.
In recent years, many dozens more mass public shootings have been stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. But people don't hear enough about these genuine acts of heroism.
Research: Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe: Data on the Rate of Shootings and Accidents in Schools that allow Teachers to Carry - John R. Lott
Abstract: After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools.
There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work.
There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns. Fears of teachers carrying guns in terms of such problems as students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all, and there was only one accidental discharge outside of school hours with no one was really harmed. While there have not been any problems at schools with armed teachers, the number of people killed at other schools has increased significantly – doubling between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3377801
Lies and Damn Lies About Extreme Risk Protection Orders-Colorado Version
Earlier this year, (Feb 25th) Denver Post journalist, Anna Staver, published an article titled “What Colorado can learn from “red flag” gun laws in other states as lawmakers debate passing their own version”. This article blurred the lines of distinction between reality and guesswork in an effort to justify Colorado’s proposed “Red Flag” Emergency Risk Protection Orders (ERPO) bill by attempting to show the effects of this law on other states.
Proponents of this Colorado bill argued that it was a “suicide prevention measure”, as threat to harm self is one of the reasons for firearms confiscation allowed in the bill. (Similar to all FOUR PA filed bills) Never mind the chilling unintended consequences this law would have on those who are feeling suicidal – such as fear of reaching out for help, and escalating an already distressing situation. But the suicide facts Ms. Staver used in her article are wrong on their face. Here’s what her article says about suicide:
Suicide prevention
Suicide is the leading type of gun death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And supporters of Colorado’s extreme risk protection order bill claim it would prevent some of those deaths from happening in the Centennial State.
“What we are doing with this bill is giving law enforcement a tool that they need to save lives,” said Rep. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial. “The majority of the time it’s going to be someone who is going to do harm to themselves.”
The data supports Sullivan’s assertion that if Colorado allows extreme risk protection orders, the majority of cases will involve suicidal ideation. About 80 percent of the gun seizures in Indiana and 60 percent in Connecticut arose from concerns about suicide.
But did removing those guns prevent violent self-harm?
Aaron Kivisto, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Indianapolis who studied suicide rates in both states, said the answer is yes in Indiana and no in Connecticut.
Kivisto found a 7.5 percent reduction in suicides via gun in the decade following the enactment of Indiana’s law and a 13.7 percent reduction in Connecticut in the “post-Virginia Tech period, when enforcement of the law substantially increased.”
But he found something else in Connecticut: An uptick in non-firearm suicides meant the overall suicide rate was essentially unchanged.
He said he doesn’t know why the two states got two different results, but one possible explanation is the cultural differences between them.
“Taking the gun isn’t the end of the situation. It doesn’t reduce the crisis,” Kivisto said. “It leaves someone in a crisis without a gun.”
NOT so fast said gun rights activist, Mario Acevedo of Denver, who thought the Indiana suicide numbers didn’t seem accurate. So, he did his own research. He found that not only were Ms. Staver’s numbers inaccurate, but they were even wrong on the white paper she referenced.
Here’s the letter Mario Acevedo sent to Ms. Staver and the Denver Post. Others repeated his research from the CDC’s website and came up with exactly the same numbers he did. Indiana has one of the fastest increasing rates of suicide in the nation.
Anna Staver
astaver@denverpost.com
February 25, 2018
Anna,
In your article “Colorado can learn “red flag” lessons from red states,” you mentioned that professor Aaron Kivisto found that Indiana saw a 7.5 percent reduction in gun suicides following the 2005 adoption of their “red lag” gun confiscation law. That sounded off to me since Indiana is a state hit hard by the opioid epidemic and suicides are an unfortunate consequence of such drug abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control:
In 2005, Indiana had 416 gun suicides, 745 total suicides, and 11.82 suicides per 100K population Age Adjusted Rate.
In 2017, Indiana had 604 gun suicides, 1092 total suicides, and 16.36 suicides per 100K population Age Adjusted Rate.
I don’t know what numbers or methodology Kivisto was using but his findings appear to be completely bogus. You are more than welcome to confirm my numbers at the CDC WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports.
My issue with red flag laws is that there’s a lot of hand waving over the results that cause me to question the purpose of such law. Effective policy, in this case to reduce fatal self-harm, must be based on reality and facts, not simply good intentions or wishes.
Sincerely,
Mario Acevedo
Denver, Colorado
We really shouldn’t have to fact check the fact checkers.
Mario also contacted the author of the white paper, Aaron Kivisto. Mr. Kivisto did respond! But his response gave us a big WTF? Basically, they decided the rate of suicide has decreased because it’s lower than what the projected rates were had the bill not passed. Do these people have a crystal ball?
Mr. Acevedo,
Thanks for your email. You’re absolutely right that in absolute terms suicides have increased. Our study approached the issue not in terms of absolute reductions, however, but in terms of reductions from the number of suicides that would have been expected in each state had the lot not been passed. In other words, our statistical approach utilized a technique known as the synthetic control methodology. It’s an approach developed by MIT economists to study the effects of policy changes and is currently considered among the most robust methods available to study the impact of policy change. In short, the approach provides a counterfactual – that is, an estimate of what the suicide rate would have been in Indiana had they not enacted the law, as well as in Connecticut had they not enacted the law. These estimates are compared to observed rates, and reductions represent the difference between these estimated and observed values.
The apparent contradiction you were noticing comes from the fact that suicide rates can indeed rise, but not rise at as rapid arete as would be expected. Similarly, there could be an absolute reduction in suicide rates, but a reduction not as fast as would be expected, which would be interpreted as a problematic impact.
I hope that this is helpful.
Aaron Kivisto, Ph.D., HSPP
Watch this testimony given by 19 year gun rights activist, Haley Marcantonio, during the Red Flag ERPO hearing earlier this year. What she doesn’t mention in her testimony is her family has been personally touched by suicide, as many of ours have. The anti-gun community does not get a monopoly on suicide.
ERPO laws are ‘not’ intended to do anything other than provide an expedited tool to disarm Americans!
Anti-Gun Group Tries to Reinvent the Wheel With a New Attempt at Divide-and-Conquer Tactic
Former Representative Gabrielle Giffords went to Minnesota to announce the creation of a gun safety advocacy group,” The New York Times publicized approvingly. “The group’s agenda is predictable … Its composition is not: The members are all gun owners.”
“Gun owners join the push for common sense gun laws.” The editorial board of the Minneapolis Star Tribune follows up. “Some are rejecting the NRA and making their voices heard in the state debate — and just in time.”
You see what’s going on here: Gungrabby Gabby et al. are attempting to make people, and especially politicians, believe gun owners support citizen disarmament. Some do. We call them “Fudds.”
The group, deceptively calling itself “Minnesotans Gun Owners for Safety,” is the second state chapter to form so far, the first being in Colorado. For now, the goals are being presented to appear modest and reasonable, at least to the uninformed” universal background checks” and “extreme risk protection” laws. That the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice has concluded “Effectiveness [of UBCs] depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration,” and that “red flag laws” allow the state to confiscate guns from citizens not even charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one, and presume “guilty until proven innocent,” is left unmentioned.
What’s clear from their web page is that they do nothing to promote actual safe practices for guns, but instead call for infringements and call that “safety.” For now, Giffords is enjoying the free publicity from supportive media, but keeping information about membership close to the vest, making it fair to question if they only have a handful of virtue-signaling Democrat “sport shooters,” oblivious to the reality that they’re being exploited as the useful idiots they are.
Let’s hear from a committed anti-gun zealot (and a George Soros protégé at that), Rebecca Peters, who was Director of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) from 2002 to 2010:
“Peters states that civilians should not have ‘rifles that they can kill someone at 100 meters distance, for example. There needs to be a much greater degree of proportionality in the firepower that’s available.’ Clearly, she said ‘single-shot rifles and shotguns’ are all anyone needs to go hunting, one of the few lawful uses of firearms which she recognized. During the debate, she showed little concern for the Britons who had lost their right to compete with modern rifles and handguns. That’s just too bad, Peters said. ‘So get another hobby,’ she advised.”
For some of us, this is NOT a hobby.
By dividing gun owners, those bent on destroying our foundational rights are trying to conquer all, but in stages, one specialized gun owner interest group at a time. I’m reminded of a story from The Odyssey when the Cyclops Polyphemus promised he’d eat Odysseus last.
He still intended to eat him. The only way out was by banding together and fighting with everything they had, like their lives depended on it.
Founding Fathers Statement on Freedom: "[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice." John Quincy Adams, Speech to the House of Representatives, 1821
Yours in Freedom,
Kim Stolfer
