Missing the target
Levdansky's gun proposal would do nothing to reduce violent crime
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
By Kim Stolfer
On May 18, state Rep. David Levdansky, D-Forward, graced the readers of this paper with another installment of his out-of-touch views as to the causes of violent gun crime ("Guns Are Killing Us"). According to Mr. Levdansky, his proposal to require the reporting of lost or stolen firearms is a matter of common sense, but we ask this question: Where is the common sense?
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Kim Stolfer is chairman of Firearms Owners Against Crime, a Pennsylvania political action committee (
www.foac-pac.org). He lives in McDonald.
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Obviously, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives did not believe Mr. Levdansky's amendment was sensible. House floor debates showed exactly why this poorly written piece of legislation failed. One need only read a transcript of the debate to understand why so many stood in opposition to Mr. Levdansky's "sensible gun control."
To highlight some of the problems with his legislation:
It requires that lost or stolen guns be reported to police within 72 hours, with prosecutors given the discretion to decide when you "should have known" your gun was missing. The record of trusting prosecutors throughout this commonwealth to handle unintentional violations of laws is filled with abuses of authority.
If you had more than one firearm stolen, say, three, this poorly written legislation would allow you to be prosecuted as if they were stolen in succession. You could be charged with a summary offense, a misdemeanor and a felony for missing a reporting deadline even if there were no suggestion that you had criminal intent. Even a summary offense would follow you for the rest of your life, which means you could be denied a license to carry a firearm for self-defense.
Mr. Levdansky's legislation failed to gather the support of legislators for these reasons, and Pennsylvania firearms owners were outspoken in their opposition even though Mr. Levdansky claims "polls" show popular support for his measure.
Mr. Levdansky's deluded reasoning for adding more laws to the hundreds of Pennsylvania and federal laws that already regulate private ownership of firearms is meant to appeal to citizens' emotions. He would like us to believe that his measure would reduce access to illegal firearms. What Mr. Levdansky doesn't mention is the evidence that mandatory reporting of lost or stolen guns has a track record of failure in preventing criminals from getting guns. This is electioneering at its worst!
The real answer to violent crime was offered in a 1998 Philadelphia Inquirer article about lax prosecution of gun cases. It quoted Senior Judge William A. Brady as telling police and prosecutors that they had to "get more serious."
Despite this article, criminal prosecutions for illegal gun possession have steadily declined since it appeared! A Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing report detailed prosecutions under the Uniform Firearms Act and revealed a consistent pattern of failure to aggressively prosecute violent criminals.
Still, Mr. Levdansky calls for more gun control while remaining silent on the failure of authorities to prosecute criminals under laws already in place. Apparently Mr. Levdansky believes that prosecutors will somehow jump at the chance to enforce one more chapter added to the 126 pages of gun laws already on the books in Pennsylvania.
A more recent Inquirer article from March of this year revealed that most of the state's 67 county prosecutors in 2006 and 2007 did not prosecute straw buyers -- those without criminal records who purchase guns for criminals. Yet Attorney General Tom Corbett's Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force has managed to use current gun laws against criminals, making 165 arrests, launching 594 investigations and seizing 262 firearms. The city homicide rate has been reduced by 25 percent.
Examples abound of the failure of utopian crusades for ultimate security at the expense of freedom. Mr. Levdansky stated in his article that he "believes that our Constitution grants me the right to bear arms" and yet his record shows a disdain for this freedom. At a Game and Fisheries Committee hearing in 1986 in Clarion, Pa., Mr. Levdansky said, "Insofar as the constitutional question of the right to keep and bear arms is concerned, I think that that argument is rather hollow and shallow ... At best, I think that the right-to-bear-arms argument is nothing more than rightwing, ideological rhetoric and ought to be dismissed as such." His statements and voting record reveal his true beliefs, and his position on these issues cannot be trusted.
Gun control advocacy groups and their supporters in the Legislature refuse to accept responsibility for advocating public policies that fail to fulfill their promises and do nothing to reduce violent crime. We must guard against blindly opening a Pandora's Box of feel-good measures that would leave us all at greater risk.
