|
|||||||
| Notices |
| Pennsylvania Discuss Pennsylvania-Specific, firearm-related politics and organize communication with state representatives here. |
| PAFOA Sponsors Businesses that provide financial and technical support to PAFOA. | PAFOA Shopping Partners A percentage of all sales made through these partner links goes to PAFOA. | |||
|
|
 |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Update Feb 15th 11:15 am approx
Got this email from Kim Stolfer about status on HB 1523 & Feb 15th with 2nd consideration scheduled vote being pulled again Quote:
There is Nothing more that we can do right now about HB 1523 as you can read from Kim's message. YOU can now take on all of the lies of the anti-gunners now that we have drawn them out, in comments section to media articles. ~OR~ IF you want to contact Reps on other pending bills in HBG, you could that today instead. HB 1668 with 99 sponsors - pulled bill in JC vote on Jan 24, 2012 HB 1860 with 71 sponsors HB 2127 with 49 sponsors HB 752 with 88 sponsors HB 935 with 76 sponsors They are all posted on PAFOA with who to contact info & why Will see about getting PAFOA banner switched back to green instead of red till this is ready to move again in March. Note they have 10 sessions day to move this bill or do something with HB 1523 in the house.
__________________
May 8 2012 HBG 7th RKBA annual lobbying event see - Political for details or 2arally.com 
|
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Quote:
Just my opinion, of course!
__________________
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Quote:
maybe leave it up till Sun feb 19th so people that want to know outcome or what happened can find easy and then pull it down till mid march We should have a new plan of action ready by then
__________________
May 8 2012 HBG 7th RKBA annual lobbying event see - Political for details or 2arally.com
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Quote:
Quote:
__________________
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
|||
|
|||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Got this reply over lunch from Representative Gingrich:
"Thanks for sharing your support for HB 1523. I share your perspective and will support the bill as it goes through the legislative process. Mauree G." BTW, after reading the update I sent the following to the house leadership: Seeing the so called leadership has shown a Lack of Leadership and moral turpitude and NOT followed he will of he people and allowed a vote of HB 1523, Please be advised, and let it be known far and wide, the Republican Party of PA will NOT receive $.01 in donations from me till we get rid of all you cowards or you reverse this travesty against the will of the people. While convention directs me to call you Honorable, you are No more Honorable than the thugs that are pulling your strings, you DISGUST ME!
__________________
Last edited by theshadow; February 15th, 2012 at 01:50 PM. Reason: add more info
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Quote:
__________________
"Political Correctness is just tyranny with manners" -Charlton Heston "[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 46. "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." [sic] -John Quincy Adams "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson Μολών λαβέ! -King Leonidas
|
|
February 15th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Quote:
__________________
May 8 2012 HBG 7th RKBA annual lobbying event see - Political for details or 2arally.com
|
|
February 17th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
I received this email response this AM:
Quote:
Quote:
__________________
|
|
February 17th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
Update we picked up another sponsor to HB 1523
see OP for people to contact. we are going to need all the house sponsor we can get for the senate battles http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/...type=B&BN=1523 Quote:
__________________
May 8 2012 HBG 7th RKBA annual lobbying event see - Political for details or 2arally.com
|
|
March 7th, 2012
|
||||
|
||||
|
Re: 2011-12 Proposed law for dealing with Municipalities Violating Preemption Law
The War in the media rages on for the passage of HB 1523 into law. Lots of interesting quotes to comment on for ALL
Part One http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/ne...nts=1&showAll= 12-03-06 Mayor Nutter's Crackdown on Lost/Stolen Guns Comes Under Heavy Fire Everything I believe in is right here,” says Kim Stolfer over lunch at an Olive Garden not far from his home in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. He’s pointing—not to the Kimber Ultra CDP II .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol holstered underneath his navy blazer (though he believes in that, too), but to his bag resting on a chair. It’s stuffed with papers and a laptop containing 40GB of data, studies, books and articles from the decades-long fight over gun rights in Pennsylvania. “There is no empirical study that shows that any firearm law works to reduce crime,” insists Stolfer, who’s been at the forefront of pro-gun causes in the state for nearly three decades. He also believes in the Constitution. Stolfer, 57, is a Vietnam vet who served in the Marines. A shooting instructor and recently retired postal worker, Stolfer is chairman of Firearms Owners Against Crime, a nonpartisan, gun-owner-advocating political action committee that a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist once said “makes the NRA look like a pack of liberal bed-wetters.” “I thought that was pretty accurate,” Stolfer deadpans. On this day, Stolfer’s an amiable guy who hardly comes off like a “gun nut” or “bomb-thrower,” as some of his enemies on the gun-control side have called him. He’s not one of those extremists who wants to eliminate all gun laws—he says he fully supports “about 70 percent” of the gun laws currently on the books in Pennsylvania. And at one point he makes a startling admission that flies in the face of the usual caricature of the gun owner as slobbering worshipper of blue steel and bullets: “I wish guns had never been invented,” he says, “because if there were no guns, there would be no war, and once you’ve been in war ... friends of mine didn’t come home.” But there are guns, and there’s a Second Amendment, and Stolfer’s dedicated his life to upholding it. “The Constitution means something to me,” he says. “I swore an oath to defend it, and I will. It’s my duty to protect the rights of all law-abiding gun owners and to ensure they’re not victimized.” That’s why he took a lead role in drafting House Bill 1523—otherwise known as the “Firearms Preemption Enhancement Bill”—sponsored by Stolfer’s close friend, gun-rights stalwart (and the left’s favorite bogeyman) state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler County). The bill, co-sponsored by 70 other legislators, was designed to counter local ordinances that have cropped up in Pennsylvania over the past few years that require gun owners to report a lost or stolen firearm to the police within a specified time frame or face the possibility of fines and/or jail time. The ordinances were put in place to crack down on straw purchasers—individuals with clean records who legally buy firearms, then illegally sell or hand them over to felons, juveniles or anyone else barred from buying and owning them—who commonly used the simple-yet-effective excuse, “Oh, it was stolen ...” when crime guns are traced back to them in order to evade prosecution. Philadelphia was the first city to pass such an ordinance when Mayor Nutter signed lost/stolen legislation into law in 2008, providing for a $1,900 fine and up to 90 days in jail for anyone not reporting their firearm missing within 24 hours of discovery. Twenty-nine other cities, including Pittsburgh, Reading and Lancaster, have followed suit, each mandating their own time frames and penalties. One problem, though: Every one of those laws, arguably, is illegal. That’s because Pennsylvania has a state firearms pre-emption statute that bars local governments from enacting such ordinances: “No county, municipality or township may in any manner regulate the lawful ownership, possession, transfer or transportation of firearms, ammunition or ammunition components when carried or transported for purposes not prohibited by the laws of this Commonwealth.” Approved via a bipartisan 19-4 vote in the House Judiciary Committee last month and up for consideration as soon as next week, HB 1523 would allow an individual to sue any city with a lost/stolen ordinance—even if that person hasn’t actually been prosecuted under the law—and be awarded up to triple-damages plus $5,000 from the city. The bill would also grant “a membership organization ... that is dedicated in whole or in part to protecting the legal, civil or constitutional rights of its membership”—say, the National Rifle Association, or Stolfer’s political action committee, for instance—the standing to bring similar legal action and receive damages. Unless, as the bill states, cities with such lost/stolen ordinances rescind them after HB 1523 becomes law. Gun-control advocates call it blackmail. Stolfer’s got a different opinion. “It’s called citizens demanding accountability from the government when they disobey the law,” he says. “It’s not blackmail.” Essentially, the gunfight shapes up like this: Opponents of HB 1523—including Mayor Nutter and the Philadelphia-based anti-gun-violence organization CeaseFirePA—say the bill threatens lost/stolen laws that have become effective in convicting straw purchasers and getting illegal guns out of the hands of killers, and that the pro-gun side is putting the lives of citizens at risk over paranoid notions that someone is coming to lock them up and take their guns away. But Stolfer and other proponents of the bill claim that lost/stolen laws do nothing to prevent crime but put law-abiding gun owners in jeopardy of unfair prosecution, and that the ordinances are really just an attempt to advance gun control’s political agenda and chip away at the pre-emption statute. They say the other side’s strategy isn’t to ban guns outright but to make owning one so burdensome and potentially costly that people will decide it’s not worth the trouble—in essence, a backdoor ban. On April 10, 2008, just a few months into his first term, Nutter signed into law five local gun-control ordinances, including lost/stolen, that were passed by City Council. The theory was that straw purchasers would no longer be able to use the “It was stolen” excuse, that cops could at least charge them with something, and maybe the ordinance would act as a deterrent. Hardly a slam-dunk tactic, but city officials were desperate. The year before, 2007, had been especially bloody, with 391 homicides on the books. They were also motivated in part by the Oct. 2007 slayings of armored truck guards (and retired cops) William Widmaier and Joseph Alullo, who were gunned down in Northeast Philly by career felon Mustafa Ali, who’d gotten the handgun used in the killings from a straw buyer. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined in 2000 that straw purchases were the source of firearms in nearly half of its national gun-trafficking investigations. That’s often due to the fact that many criminals prefer new guns to the plethora of stolen guns passed around frequently in the illicit market—those guns may already be linked to other crimes or “have bodies on them.” Law enforcement insisted straw purchasing was a serious problem in Philly, and help wasn’t coming from Harrisburg. Some lawmakers introduced bills in 2007 and 2008 intended to create a state lost/stolen law, but scores of Pennsylvania gun owners—backed by the NRA, FOAC and other gun groups—complained that while they were already law-abiding citizens responsible enough to report their guns missing, to potentially criminalize them for failing to do so was not only unfair but an infringement on their constitutional right to bear arms. The bills failed, so the mayor took it upon himself to act. “For too long, cities have waited for Washington or Harrisburg to take the lead in the fight for the kind of commonsense gun safety measures our citizens want,” Nutter said upon signing the five ordinances. “This demonstrates what can be achieved when local governing bodies and mayors step up to take action on gun safety.” Incensed, the NRA immediately sued the city. A Common Pleas judge struck down two of the ordinances—an assault weapons ban and a one-gun-a-month law—as unconstitutional but let the three others, including lost/stolen, stand. The judge ruled that because no one had been prosecuted under lost/stolen, the ordinance couldn’t be challenged. But now, with HB 1523 threatening Philly’s lost/stolen law, Nutter has implored congressional leadership to oppose the bill. In a letter he sent on Feb. 20, Nutter wrote: “These local efforts should not be seen as an affront to state authority, given that such efforts will often survive court challenge, but rather as an example of local authorities working in partnership with the statutory framework set out by the Commonwealth. “We recognize that a policy balance must be struck between the rights of law-abiding citizens to bear arms against the value of sensible, low-impact requirements such as reporting lost or stolen weapons, which can have a significant impact on the availability of unlawful gun use by criminals,” he continued. “There simply is no reasonable basis for coercing local government away from good faith efforts to strike this balance in a measured way.” Stolfer sees the scales tipping against gun owners. With a law on the books that potentially criminalizes legitimate gun owners for failing to report lost or stolen firearms, he says, “What’s to stop some gun-hating prosecutor from specifically targeting gun owners down the line, just to send a message?” Stolfer lays out the scenario: “The cops come to the door. You say, ‘No, sir, I didn’t report it stolen.’ So now they arrest you because you were negligent. They put you in handcuffs, they go through your whole house and take all your other firearms. They might have pointed guns at your wife and kids. It hits the papers. You might lose your job. Your reputation is ruined, even if you’re not charged. Say you are charged. Now you’ve got to get an attorney, you know what that costs? Now the judge says, ‘This is a horrible abuse of the system’ and drops all the charges. Now you’ve still got the attorney’s fees. The DA has confiscated all your guns and he’s in no hurry to give them back. And now they revoke your carry permit because you were negligent, or they say you violated the ‘character and reputation’ clause.” And to Stolfer, this isn’t far-fetched. “It can happen and it will happen if laws like this that threaten the law-abiders with criminal penalties and do nothing to stop violent criminals are allowed to stand,” he says. “Most responsible gun owners report their guns lost or stolen, but sometimes circumstances prevent that, or people suddenly get busy and can’t do it within 24 hours, or people don’t trust the authorities to do the right thing. There’s no protections for them. It’s absolutely unfair.” And in case anyone wants to brush off his concerns as baseless paranoia, Stolfer says that all one has to do is look at the February 2011 incident involving Montgomery County gun-rights activist Mark Fiorino. PPD officers drew their weapons on Fiorino, who was open-carrying his firearm (which is legal) in Northeast Philly, and detained him for 40 tense minutes. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the PPD last month on behalf of Fiorino, who’s become a cause celebre for the gun-rights crowd that believes law enforcement—and by extension the government—has no respect for, or belief in, the rights of law-abiding gun owners. “The track record is there on laws they have abused, as directed by the policymakers,” says Stolfer. “It’s not some tin-foil-hat, sky-is-falling nonsense. It happens.” Stolfer claims that the ordinance is already having a chilling effect on gun owners he talks to across the state. “A number have mentioned to me that they’re thinking about just getting rid of their guns because they don’t want to take any chances [with getting arrested]. It’s making life miserable for law-abiding citizens. That’s what people like Max Nacheman want.” Nacheman is director of CeaseFirePA. He, too, believes in the Constitution. “There is no question there’s a Constitutional right to bear arms, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have certain reasonable limitations on that right,” Nacheman says. “They say that I’m trying to ban guns—I love getting the emails at all hours of night talking about how we’re trying to ban guns. We’re not trying to ban guns.” But, he says, “A small burden on a law-abiding gun owner [to report a firearm lost or stolen], that’s a pretty small price to pay if you’re gonna get another gun criminal in jail and prevent a homicide.” Setting the legal arguments regarding state pre-emption aside, Nacheman and other lost/stolen advocates could make a strong case for opposing HB 1523 if they can establish that it works; that the tangible benefits in combating straw purchasers and gun violence outweigh the potential risks to law-abiding gun owners. At first glance, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Three-and-a-half years after being implemented, not one single person in Philadelphia has been prosecuted under the lost/stolen ordinance. In fact, no one in the entire state has been prosecuted under similar laws. Of course, that’s primarily because of the questions surrounding the legitimacy of the ordinances and the reticence to send a test case up the legal chain and watch a court strike down the law entirely. In fact, after Nutter signed the law, then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham stated that she would not enforce the law because it was unconstitutional. A handful of other states—including New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Massachusetts—have mandatory state lost/stolen laws, so there are no concerns about pre-emption there, yet proponents of the laws cite only two cases in the entire country in which someone’s been prosecuted under lost/stolen (both occurred in Cleveland, once in 1996 and the other in 2001). The problem is that it remains exceptionally difficult to prove because even a mildly savvy straw purchaser can still easily wiggle out of any interrogation by claiming they didn’t know the weapon was lost or stolen. “They got smarter,” laments PPD Capt. Fran Healy, special advisor to Commissioner Charles Ramsey. “Instead of saying, ‘I lost it two years ago,’ they’re saying, ‘Oh, I thought it was in my house ...’” Another issue: To date, no academic or law-enforcement studies exist that demonstrate the impact of lost/stolen laws on straw purchases. “I don’t know anybody who has studied that,” confirms Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Add to that the fact that the Pennsylvania Uniform Firearms Act already provides serious penalties for straw purchasers. According to the act, anyone who knowingly sells or otherwise transfers a firearm to someone ineligible to possess a firearm commits a third-degree felony. Straws can be charged with illegal transfer of firearms, and get up to seven years in jail. If that’s not going to deter a would-be straw purchaser, why would the possibility of violating a Philadelphia code ordinance—an arrestable offense, but in the grand scheme of things equivalent to only a summary offense—make a difference? According to several law-enforcement officials, there are a couple of compelling reasons. The first is the idea that some not-so-bright gun traffickers think that they can outsmart the system by preemptively reporting firearms as lost or stolen to steer attention away from their illicit activities. “Well, guess what? You do that two or three times and your local law enforcement are gonna get the picture of who you are and what you’re doing,” says Healy, saying that the red flag spurs police to open an investigation. “I can see losing one gun in a year, things happen. But four or five or more? Are they falling out of your pocket? That’s one of the benefits of the law—I’ll be able to identify somebody who’s trying to play cute.” The second reason—says one high-ranking Philadelphia law-enforcement official with extensive knowledge of the investigation and prosecution of straw purchasers, who spoke to PW on condition of anonymity—is that in practice, the ordinance is employed more often as a leveraging tool to get a confession from the straw, helping to build a case for the third-degree felony charge. Perhaps they’ve already caught a perp with the firearm and want to shut down the source. Or they need information about who the straw gave the gun to, particularly if the gun in question was recovered at a crime scene, such as a homicide, and there are no suspects. The source explains that that investigative approach has to do with who the straw purchasers mostly are. Typically, they’re a girlfriend—or sometimes a family member—of the felon, and they’ve been sweet-talked, intimidated or outright threatened to make the purchase. Often, they’re addicts who trade guns for drugs, according to the source. When investigators trace the gun back to them, they’ll give the “It was stolen months ago” line. Without the ordinance, says the source, investigators couldn’t do much. But with the ordinance, law enforcement can threaten an immediate arrest for failure to report the gun stolen. It’s a means to flip a suspect, to get them to tell the truth. “By their nature they’re all first-time offenders, because otherwise they couldn’t buy a gun,” the source says. “If this was a hardened criminal they’d say, ‘Fuck you, I’ll plead guilty [to the lost/stolen ordinance] and be done with it. But to a person that’s never been arrested or convicted before, never seen the inside of a jail, and maybe been pressured into this transaction in the first place, we can say, ‘Hey, we got you, you lied.’ They’re scared. And sometimes that’s when they’ll admit what they did.”
__________________
May 8 2012 HBG 7th RKBA annual lobbying event see - Political for details or 2arally.com
|
|
| Bookmarks |
| Thread Tools | |
| Display Modes | |
Linear Mode
|
|
Similar Threads
|
||||
| Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
| Are YOU Tired Of Municipalities Violating PA Firearms Preemption Law? | WhiteFeather | Pennsylvania | 103 | November 4th, 2010 08:26 AM |
| Municipalities in violation of §6120 (Preemption) | gnbrotz | Pennsylvania | 0 | October 12th, 2010 03:28 PM |
| Shaw's Bridge Park is violating preemption | XACEX | Chester | 15 | August 1st, 2010 07:16 PM |
| LEGAL FUND - To challenge municipalities who refuse to comply with preemption | gnbrotz | General | 18 | October 3rd, 2008 04:40 PM |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 02:47 PM.