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
More from the gun wars . . . . :: 12/27/2015
In its latest installment in a crusade to rid America of firearms, The New York Times “reports” on a “study” that purports to show how, in the first six years after Missouri “repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent to 18 percent higher than it was the six years before.”
Oh, what an indictment, eh? Well, not exactly.
The Times, which on Dec. 5 ran a front-page editorial (the first since 1920 when it took Republicans to task for nominating Warren G. Harding for president) against guns, was citing a study by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. But as gun scholar John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, pointed out for me last week, “cherry picking” results tend to give you the results you're predisposed to seek.
As Mr. Lott found, in an exhaustive 2014 review of Mr. Webster's research, the results are more complicated than simply looking at what the average murder rates were before and after rescinding the Missouri law.
“While it is true that the murder rate in Missouri rose (about) 17 percent relative to the rest of the United States after the law was changed, it had actually increased by 32 percent during the five years prior to the change,” Lott then wrote.
Thus, the real question for researchers to consider, according to Lott, is why “the Missouri murder rate was increasing relative to the rest of the U.S. at a slower rate after the change in the law” — after the comprehensive background checks were scotched — “than it did prior to it.”
But the bottom line remains this: “Imposing the law raised murder and robbery rates,” Lott told me. “Removing the law lowered them.”
Meanwhile, in other gun war news:
• Virginia announced Tuesday that it is canceling its concealed carry reciprocity agreement with 25 states, Pennsylvania included. That is, if you have a valid Pennsylvania concealed carry license, you could carry concealed in Virginia.
State Attorney General Mark Herring says those 25 states have more lax concealed carry laws than his commonwealth. The new restriction goes into effect Feb. 1. An estimated 6.3 million concealed carry permit holders will be affected by the change.
This change will create a challenge for Pennsylvanians traveling to the South, forced to unconceal their firearms from their person at the Virginia border and to then secure them “in a container or compartment in the vehicle,” though no lock is necessary, according to Old Dominion State regulations.
• God bless him, actor Kurt Russell isn't backing down from his right-on-the-money assessment that “rendering law-abiding Americans defenseless while contravening the Second Amendment” somehow will protect us from terrorists.
Mr. Russell says the “latest futile push for gun control is just another clumsy attempt to distract from the Obama administration's utterly inept response to Islamic terrorism. And pretty much everything else.”
How refreshing it is to see at least one person in Hollywood with a brain.
Colin McNickle is Trib Total Media's director of editorial pages (412-320-7836 or cmcnickle@tribweb.com).
http://triblive.com/opinion/colinmcnickle/9655776-74/gun-law-carry#axzz3vUpzZ3lh
