PA Bill Number: SB1198
Title: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and ...
Description: In plants and plant products, providing for plant and pollinator protection; conferring powers and duties on the Department of Agriculture and .. ...
Last Action: Referred to AGRICULTURE AND RURAL AFFAIRS
Last Action Date: May 17, 2024
Media Bias: Lawmakers aid gun lobby :: 04/04/2017
Some Pennsylvania legislators have a very high threshold for embarrassment. After the state Supreme Court exposed them last year as being shills for the NRA, throwing out a law that they had passed illegally, those lawmakers came right back this year with the very same law as a new bill.
Thomas Wortham III, speaks of his late son, Chicago police officer Thomas Wortham IV, background, during an April 24, 2013 news conference in Chicago. Wortham’s son was murdered in 2010 with a trafficked gun that had been purchased in Mississippi by a “straw man.” A Pennsylvania bill effectively would prevent local governments from acting against such “straw man” purchases. (Associated Press File)
The overturned law had given the NRA and other pro-gun groups standing to sue municipal governments that adopt gun regulations stricter than those adopted by the state Legislature — which, of course, most often operates as a subsidiary of the gun lobby.
That law was created in response to a statewide trend in which dozens of municipal governments attempted to improve public safety through two modest gun regulations.
Some of the local governments limited gun purchases to one per month per person in an effort to stop “straw-man purchases,” in which someone legally able to purchase weapons does so and sells them to criminals.
Most of them adopted a measure that required gun owners to report to police when their weapons are lost or stolen. That was meant to stop gun owners from selling their guns to criminals and later claiming, when the weapons are used in crimes, that they had been lost or stolen.
Neither provision interfered with the right to bear arms. They were designed to promote the public interest in arms being borne responsibly.
In multiple cases, the NRA or other gun groups attempted to sue against the ordinances. But in each case the courts found that the groups did not have legal standing because, of course, they could not demonstrate that they had suffered any harm.
The Legislature responded with a terrible law. It not only granted automatic standing to the gun groups in such cases, but required the municipal governments to pay the groups’ legal fees if the groups won.
Most local governments rescinded their ordinances for fear of those legal costs.
Lawmakers who concocted this law knew it was lousy, so they attached it to an unrelated bill to avoid a debate on its lack of merit.
That alone is horrible governance. The state Supreme Court threw out the law because the state Constitution bars the Legislature from passing bills about more than one subject.
Now the state Senate Local Government Committee has approved an identical bill.
It is shameful for state lawmakers to blithely favor any special interest over the public interest in public safety. For them to empower a private interest to intimidate local governments is unconscionable.
If the Legislature passes this atrocity, Gov. Tom Wolf should intercept it in the hallway and veto it before it gets to his desk.
http://thetimes-tribune.com/opinion/lawmakers-aid-gun-lobby-1.2175509
