PA Bill Number: HR541
Title: Recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Description: A Resolution recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Last Action:
Last Action Date: Sep 27, 2024
More laws won't help :: 07/15/2015
No surprise there. One of the most powerful ways to advance unreasoned public policy is to foist it on a grief-stricken population.
But the irony of using the Emanuel AME tragedy to launch attacks on the Second Amendment is that the incident might have been averted had officials simply enforced laws already on the books.
The FBI now says it should have flagged accused shooter Dylann Roof for a pending drug charge when he purchased a gun from a South Carolina retailer in April.
“We are all sick that this has happened,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters in Washington.
Comey said an examiner unfamiliar with South Carolina geography contacted the wrong law enforcement jurisdiction while trying to obtain details on Roof’s arrest in February for illegal possession of Suboxone.
Though Roof hadn’t been convicted, Comey says the 21-year-old’s admission to possessing the prescription drug would have indicated he was “actively engaged” in unlawful drug use and disqualified the purchase.
But as it happened, Roof walked out with a .45-caliber Glock pistol that police say he used to kill nine churchgoers two months later.
Of course, the futility of gun control laws – including background check laws – is that they do not prevent criminal acts nor totally stop the criminally-minded from obtaining guns.
Any reasonable person can understand someone as driven and depraved as Roof would acquire a weapon any way he could, legally or not.
That’s why President Obama was flat-out wrong when he said the Charleston shooting might not have happened “if Congress had passed some commonsense gun safety reforms” after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
But if the Obama administration followed “commonsense” immigration reforms, 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle likely would still be alive instead of murdered by a multiple-felon illegal immigrant in the “sanctuary” city of San Francisco.
Conjecture about the Steinle shooting aside, there is nothing in the post-Newtown gun control legislation that would have
prevented the Charleston murders.
It wasn’t a lack of gun control that enabled Roof to have a pistol – it was a failure of the federal government’s bureaucracy. And it wasn’t law-abiding gun owners, the “gun lobby” or the Second Amendment that killed the Emanuel AME churchgoers – it was an ignorant racist with delusions of glory.
So before infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights any further, is it too much to ask the government to properly enforce the restrictions it already has placed on us?
By Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/editorials/2015-07-14/more-laws-wont-help
