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More Americans will die today from guns than have been killed by ISIS. GOP will do anything to fight the latter, nothing about the former.- LOLGOP

Email
Subject: PA Supreme Court Shoots Down NRA-backed Act 192

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck a blow for gun safety and for transparent government with its June 25th decision in Leach et al. v. Commonwealth et al. I’ll explain what that is and why it matters in a minute. First, some background.

James Carville once described Pennsylvania as, “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle.”

The people in the vast middle swath of “Pennsyl-bama,” including my native Lancaster County, love their guns, mostly for utilitarian reasons: target shooting (and competitions), hunting, and protection of property and livestock against creatures like bears, coyotes, and the occasional wolf. By and large, these people are truly responsible gun owners. Gun safety is paramount. And they often eat what they hunt.

That’s not the case in the urban areas, though. In the cities, handguns vastly outnumber long guns and people carry them mainly either to commit crimes or to protect themselves from other people with guns. Shooting skill and gun safety instruction are not emphasized and there are many accidental, as well as a good number of intentional, shootings.

Recognizing that the urban environment requires tighter restrictions on firearms, over a hundred municipalities, mostly in the densely-populated southeast, started passing local gun control ordinances that were more restrictive than the state’s gun laws.

How much more restrictive? Not much. Typically they beefed-up lost-and-stolen gun reporting requirements, banned carrying firearms in parks, and prohibited shooting within city limits – common sense restrictions.

Predictably, the NRA and the right wing went ballistic (an especially fitting word in this context) and their Republican handmaidens in the Legislature got busy trying to undermine or nullify those ordinances. One of their leaders was House Speaker Mike Turzai, who infamously said, “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” (Somebody needs to tell him that the real name is “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”)

The Republican plan was to allow anybody who objected to the ordinances (yes, even the NRA, as long as it had a single member who lived in the state) to sue the cities and towns that passed them – and to do so at the municipalities’ expense.

Think about that: this law basically redefined the concept of “standing” in court for this law. Under the law the Republicans crafted, you didn’t have to be adversely affected by a law; just being offended by it was enough to bring a lawsuit.

Cities and towns realized that if they passed gun control ordinances, the NRA would sue them and they would have to bear their own and the NRA’s legal expenses.

Many municipalities declined to pass gun control ordinances, or rescinded ordinances they had already passed, because they were intimidated – which was the Republicans’ plan. Cities and towns realized that if they passed gun control ordinances, the NRA would sue them and they would have to bear their own and the NRA’s legal expenses.

That’s not all: several cities did pass gun control ordinances, got sued, and then held fundraisers to help with the legal costs. The NRA demanded to know the names and addresses of people who contributed to such funds, presumably to harass and intimidate them personally.

Funny thing, how it’s okay to have anonymous donors when you’re a SuperPAC but not when you’re raising money to support gun control.

Republicans also knew that if their proposal were ever debated in public, urban and suburban voters would never support it. So they came up with a way to attach their provisions to an unrelated and uncontroversial law, and it passed. It became known as Act 192.

Soon after Act 192 passed, lawsuits began to fly. The cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Lancaster, joined by several state legislators, decided to push back and sued the Commonwealth.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the law was unconstitutional – because the Pennsylvania Constitution says that legislators cannot insert provisions into any bill that have nothing to do with the original subject matter of the bill. The subject matter of the original bill was copper theft.

So the Court did not really rule on the merits of the provision, just on the way it got passed.

Even so, Republicans handled the bill the way they did because they knew that a clean, transparent bill would never pass on its own merits. Now they are trying to figure out what to do next. That may be difficult for them: like rats, roaches, and vampires, these Republicans will do everything they can to avoid sunshine.

The defendant legislators have 30 days to file an appeal so this matter is not yet settled. Let’s stay tuned.

Best wishes,
~Rick

Thank you so much, Rick. Scary, legislation without representation AND you have to foot the bill.

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