PA Bill Number: SB945
Title: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals.
Description: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals. ...
Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (199-0)
Last Action Date: Apr 17, 2024
PA-Observer Reporter-Rally Criticism-They're second to none in preaching paranoia :: 05/23/2015
Outside of a full-scale National Rifle Association gathering, rarely has so much paranoid delusion been stuffed into one space as when gun-rights advocates filed into the state Capitol for a rally last week to preach their special brand of unsubstantiated fear.
“I feel that they’re trying to take my gun rights away from us,” said retired trucker Harry Norton of New Brighton, according to an Associated Press report. “I’m here to kind of protect that.”
We’re not sure who “they” are, but it’s certainly not the folks working in the building where Norton was speaking. Not only are there no serious efforts afoot in the Capitol to take away anyone’s gun-ownership rights, but it was the Pennsylvania Legislature, just last fall, that did the bidding of gun-rights activists and gave groups like the NRA the right to file lawsuits against any Pennsylvania city that has dared to make its own efforts to address gun safety, such as Lancaster, which enacted a perfectly reasonable requirement that local residents make a report to police if they had a firearm that went missing or was stolen. The NRA wasted no time going to court.
Forcing the local leaders who voted on these measures to backtrack in the face of costly litigation isn’t enough for some. Kim Stolfer of a group called Firearm Owners Against Crime said “some need to go to jail.”
State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican from Carroll Township, no doubt got cheers when she called for an end to the state’s instant background check system for gun purchases, which would leave only the federal system in place.
“Sometimes the whole system crashes and we are left without the ability to exercise our Second Amendment right,” said Bartolotta.
Waiting a few minutes until a computer system reboots? Oh, the tyranny!
Of course, President Obama came in for his share of bile. It’s now been more than six years that the NRA has been telling anyone who will listen – and write them a check, of course – that the president is coming for their guns. If that’s the case, he’s coming very, very slowly. But we have to give the NRA credit for finally coming up with a new message – “Hillary Clinton is coming to take your guns!”
The fact is, nobody is coming to take anyone’s guns.
In the face of a relentless national roll call of gun death after gun death after gun death, including a massacre of schoolchildren that should be burned into our national psyche, nothing substantive is being done to enact such common-sense measures as a limit on gun magazine capacities and the closing of the gun show loophole. It’s simply not happening in the foreseeable future.
Even if the Demcrats are able to elect a president and gain control of both houses of Congress next year, it’s not happening, because far too many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle cower at the prospect of angering the NRA.
But that didn’t stop those leading the recent gun-rights rally from ginning up fear among the faithful.
The AP report said another of our area lawmakers, Elizabeth Republican Rick Saccone, told the crowd they are “missionaries for freedom,” doing battle with “minions” skulking about in the Capitol.
“They are there, living in darkness, shackled by their desire to disarm us,” said Saccone. “We’ll never let them win.”
That borders on what we like to call “crazy talk.”
And then there was Connie Moniot of Butler, who bore a sign reading, “OUR GUNS TODAY/OUR BIBLE NEXT.”
Please. Guns and Bibles aren’t going to be in short supply anytime soon. People with a firm grip on reality? Definitely an endangered species.
[Perhaps the Editors of this anti-gun rag would be better served by taking spelling lessons (they misspelled Demcrat by leaving the 'o' out) rather than criticizing citizens constitutional freedoms?!]
http://www.observer-reporter.com/article/20150519/OPINION01/150519420
