PA Bill Number: HB829
Title: In preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Description: An Act amending the act of April 12, 1951 (P.L.90, No.21), known as the Liquor Code, in preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Last Action: Signed in House
Last Action Date: Jul 3, 2024
Gun rights advocate takes stand against new gun control measures :: 09/03/2019
Daniel McMonigle knows a little bit about guns. He's been around them all his life. He's a certified firearms safety instructor. And, even today, as the nation reels from another mass shooting in Texas, he questions much of the discussion about gun control measures.
Depending on the news outlet, McMonigle notes you’ll probably find more coverage about gun-reform measures than of those who firmly believe gun laws should stay as they are. Or, more poignantly, that the Second Amendment of the Constitution allows people to own such guns.
Daniel McMonigle conforms to the latter, wanting to poke a hole in the “conflate, confuse, embellish” mantra he says the mainstream media and gun reform advocates use to over-inflate their case to create new levels of restrictions on gun ownership. In short, he sees a lot of victimization of responsible gun owners like himself.
“It’s victimizing gun owners, trying to push gun owners as evil,” he said. “It’s almost like you’re evil because we’re law-abiding citizens who recognize their Second Amendment rights.”
McMonigle, of Broomall, has been a gun owner for 50 years and is a member of a number of organizations that advocate for safe gun practices. He is a board member of Firearm Owners Against Crime and is an NRA-affiliated gun safety trainer who teaches gun safety to groups and individuals throughout the Philadelphia region. Adorning his wrist is a rubber bracelet with the words “shall not be infringed” written on it, the final words of the Second Amendment.
The notion of what does and does not connote infringement on the right to own a gun has many facets. After the Supreme Court in 2008 affirmed individual ownership of guns (not dependent for a well-regulated militia as the Second Amendment prescribes) the focus in the judiciary has slowly been moving to what limitations can be placed on Second Amendment rights.
“Total blanket prohibitions on gun ownership across the board are unconstitutional, and that still leaves a lot of room to figure out, short of that, ways that the government can prohibit, say, the possession of certain kinds of guns, can they impose background check or other ways in which one has to comply with certain regulations in order to have a gun,” said Villanova University Law Professor Michael Moreland. “Those are the range of questions that have been left unopen and now, in the wake of these tragic shootings, it always ends up generating a set of questions about what measures could be enacted by the federal government or state or local governments that would be consistent with the Second Amendment right to bear arms.”
As usual, after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio killed 31 people, the voices seeking new gun controls are getting louder. And that was before this weekend's carnage in west Texas that left another seven dead.
Assault weapon bans, background checks, red flag/extreme risk protection order laws, and mandatory gun theft reporting were four of the prominent pieces of reform legislation featured during an Aug. 20 gun violence town hall discussion led by state Sen. Tim Kearney, D-26 of Swarthmore. Each reform has corresponding bills pending action in the state House and Senate in Harrisburg.
McMonigle was at Kearney’s town hall. He says he was denied a seat on the 10-member panel and instead was relegated to speak during public comment. He was one of a number of gun rights advocates at the meeting. There was no stopping McMonigle and his ideological co-patriots from sitting silently in a room filled mostly with gun law reformers. One person said the Second Amendment does give him the right to have an arsenal of weapons and to own assault rifles. Indeed, the amendment does not explicitly mention how many or what type of firearm a person may have.
But no matter the regulation, McMonigle thinks none of them are going to stop any sort of mass killing event.
“Everything proposed will do absolutely zero with the history of the shootings,” he said, referencing a number of recent high profile shootings where he claims these reforms wouldn’t have stopped the killings (the El Paso shooter bought his gun and ammo from Romania; Nicholas Cruz in Parkland, Florida, legally purchased his rifle; Adam Lanza took his mother’s guns to shoot up Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut). A 2015 article by The New York Times, and updated in 2018, looking into the way 19 of these killers retrieved their weapons, a majority of the guns were bought legally and through a federal background check.
“At least nine gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons,” reads the story.
McMonigle said lawmakers are working on “feel-good laws” to “do something” even with a slew of related laws on the books already.
“In my opinion it’s like they’re just passing laws and the people passing these laws don’t already know there are laws on the books on what they’re supporting,” he said. “It’s almost a duplication of laws.”
McMonigle went to task pointing out flaws in different pieces of reform legislation, most notably so-called Red Flag laws, which require a court order to take away someone’s guns if it is believed they’ll be a danger to themselves or others. State Sen. Tom Killion, R-9 of Middletown, is the prime sponsor of the latest Pennsylvania Red Flag bill SB 90.
“If I used Killion’s version from the Senate bill, they like to say there is due process: No, there’s not,” he claims. “It’s ‘Minority Report’. You get arrested for a crime you didn’t commit.” Although persons investigated under red flag laws are not arrested for what someone reports to police as behavior that may be harmful in the future, a person's guns will be removed without their consent prior to an investigation.
CeaseFire PA Executive Director Shira Goodman at Kearney’s town hall reiterated that there is due process in the House version of this bill because the respondent (person to whom the extreme risk protection order is against) can get the order reversed by the person who made the initial claim at a lower standard of proof. Malicious use of this bill to target gun owners also has restitution added in.
The bill is seen as a way to help people prevent suicide attempts, seeing that suicide by guns is responsible for approximately 60 percent of all gun deaths (per 2017 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
“The Red Flag law only takes the guns,” said McMonigle. “If I had an individual in my family that is in harm of others or themselves, am I going to look in their cabinet for opioids? Am I going to look for rope in the garage, make sure their car only has a little bit of gas? Isn’t there more? I want that person to receive help.”
He continued, “If the cops are coming to get the guns and there’s no treatment, that’s silly. We recognize someone who is a danger to themselves and we’re only removing one item … you’re not putting them somewhere to get the help they need.”
When tied with background checks, he has seen how a holding period hasn't stopped someone from committing suicide with a gun.
While working at a gun store he said he had a customer come in to purchase a gun and had to wait five days to make sure the background check cleared.
“I have literally seen a guy wait five days, walk out into his car after the fifth day and kill himself. He was dead-on certainty to kill himself. It’s not about time, it’s about the state of mind,” he said. “In California you can have 10 guns at home, but you have to wait 10 days to get another one, they say because of suicide, but I already have my choices at home.”
A hold period to clear a background check for a person with a clean history is what McMonigle calls, “a right delayed is a right denied,” another attack on law-abiding citizens who have to be subject to gun laws that are a burden to own guns. He likens it to getting government clearance to read a certain book or to practice free speech at a corner rally.
When asked why a holding period to buy a handgun is such an inconvenience to someone who may already have other legally owned firearms, McMonigle said it’s about the necessity of the convenience. In this urban area of the state there are a number of places people can buy a gun. In more rural areas of the country where it could be an hours-long drive to purchase a gun, it’s inconvenient to a right that is guaranteed.
“Government has no bearing on the Second Amendment. The reason the Second Amendment exists is the government is not allowed to do that. My answer is no, there shouldn’t be any wait at home,” he said.
On the overlap between the state and FBI background check systems for handgun sales in Pennsylvania that may still create a loophole for the wrong person to buy a gun, he said this: “It’s 2019, I can go online and order a pizza and 20 minutes later that pizza place can tell me my pizza is ready for pickup, or it’s on the way. Amazon can tell me exactly where they’re at on the delivery to my home. However, the government can’t come up with a uniform system that everyone can buy into to utilize and that’s what needs to be done. If people are doing their due diligence, who isn’t? The government. Being able to track back, they don’t want that responsibility.”
McMonigle also has another major beef with most gun reform measures: They target legal gun ownership, not the illegal variety of guns used in a majority of violent crimes in areas where civic activists and elected leaders are seeking to curb that violence.
Governments, local, state or federal, still take their efforts to balance public safety with a person’s gun rights protection. A 1990 federal ban on guns in school zones was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, in the process rebuffing the government’s argument that guns near schools affects interstate commerce (Villanova’s Moreland said this was a case about federalism, not necessarily gun rights). Interstate commerce is an argument that will be made during the court’s 2019 term in a case originating in New York City about transporting handguns outside of the city to another residence or gun range.
“As long as it could be shown that this was a restriction that was necessary to achieve an important government purpose, there’s at least a plausible argument that could be consistent with the Second Amendment,” said Moreland. “That’s the range of intermediate positions in between saying the Second Amendment has no limits whatsoever, which I don’t think is a plausible position, versus the Second Amendment means that the states could prohibit all gun possession which is pretty clear that that would be unconstitutional.”
Forecasting what a court may uphold as constitutional or not on the various gun reform pieces of legislation depends on what those laws say and what the argument on them will be. With individual gun ownership firmly upheld by the Supreme Court, there are still other questions that remain unanswered because of it.
“It depends on what the state, federal or local governments try to do. The New York case may get resolved one way or another, but we’ll see if there are future efforts to enact certain kinds of restrictions,” said Moreland. “Everything depends on the specific contours: if they go too far one direction it’s a pretty clear answer, but short of that is very uncertain.”
To McMonigle, it’s all about legal gun owners always having to bend to people who want the reforms.
“The pie that we started with is getting smaller and someday we’ll be out of pie. 'Give me another piece' and all of a sudden you have no pie and I can’t give you more. They’re not coming to us and saying, ‘for those of you who have concealed carry licenses we’ll let you go to all 50 states.’ It’s all them (reformers) and us bending to them. It’s constantly let’s try another law.”
