PA Anti-Gunners Trying To Find New Ways to Challenge Preemption

Gun control advocates in Pennsylvania were handed a setback recently when the state Supreme Court handed them a 6-0 defeat on the issue of preemption. Yes, even the Democrats on the court voted to uphold preemption. That’s because it’s constitutional, at least under the state constitution.

In theory, anti-gun advocates should take a step back, lick their wounds, and reevaluate what their options are.

At least, that’s what sane and rational organizations and movements would do. These are anti-gunners, though, and there’s a certain amount of irrationality that’s required to believe that making something illegal will stop criminals–people who do illegal things all the time–from doing it.

They still think they can get preemption overturned.

Despite the ruling, Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, says he still sees legal avenues to challenge the preemption law more directly.

Other pending lawsuits specifically challenge whether the preemption law applies to municipalities regulating the sale of “ghost gun” parts — kits to build untraceable firearms at home — or the reporting of lost or stolen guns. The high court delayed them while it considered Crawford v. Commonwealth.

“In each of those cases, we are saying simply, this isn’t about firearms,” Garber said. “This is about parts that aren’t preempted, or this is about people who aren’t the possessor legally of the firearm, and that those statutes should be allowed to go ahead.”

He added that in Crawford, the state Supreme Court “did not in any way say … that every law was preempted. And so we really urge them to … consider that there are policies that are not preempted by state statute that they should allow for.”

Even though legal avenues might not be exhausted, state lawmakers who support tougher gun laws are feeling additional pressure to use the legislative process now that the state Supreme Court has ruled that the preemption stands.

That’s an impressive amount of self-delusion there.

First, every preemption challenge has gone down. The state of Pennsylvania most definitely has the authority to dictate that gun laws must originate with the state legislature.

What’s more, local gun laws would do nothing but create misdemeanors. If you’re serious about cracking down on certain actions, and you’re convinced gun laws are what will do it, you need to make the violations felonies at a minimum. Otherwise, you’re going to have those same people back on the streets inside of a year and have no appreciable effect on anything.

So this focus on ending preemption isn’t about violent crime or anything of the sort. It’s about making as many rules for owning or carrying a gun as humanly possible. It’s about creating roadblocks to minimize people exercising their right to keep and bear arms to an extreme level. That’s all that it’s about.

The kicker is that preemption doesn’t preclude local gun control. It just says that it needs to originate in the state legislature. They just know they can’t get the legislature to back gun control, so they’re going to try and settle for what they can manage, but only if preemption doesn’t stop them.

It’s pathetic, in a way. They’re so enamored with gun control that they can’t stop to think for a moment.