Pennsylvania Waiting Period Bill to Be Reintroduced

A right delayed is a right denied.

This is even touched on in a story I wrote earlier today regarding a couple of gun cases before the Supreme Court, where the Second Amendment Foundation noted, “[T]he high court has previously ruled that “the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury[.]” If all rights are equal, denying someone their Second Amendment rights, even of a very short period of time, “constitutes irreparable injury.”

But a Pennsylvania lawmaker is going to try to do that all over again by reintroducing a 72-hour waiting period bill.

Gun control legislation will be reintroduced in the Pennsylvania Senate to enact a waiting period for all firearm transfers, Senator Amanda Cappelletti announced.

Cappelletti (D-Delaware/Montgomery Counties) announced plans to reintroduce SB 637 from the last session. If passed into law, the bill would establish a 72-hour waiting period on all firearm purchases and transfers in Pennsylvania.

“One important element of a comprehensive approach to firearm violence is a waiting period for firearm transfers,” Cappelletti wrote. “Under Pennsylvania law, there is no waiting period to buy a firearm and no licensure or permitting requirement. I will soon introduce legislation establishing a 72-hour waiting period for all firearm transfers in the Commonwealth.”

Cappelletti cited studies that claim waiting periods reduce suicides to justify this blatant infringement on people’s right to keep and bear arms. Also mentioned are claims that it leads to a reduction in violent crimes.

However, all those studies do is look at gun suicides, not suicides as a whole, and that’s an issue because while firearms are used in most suicides, there are still an awful lot of them that don’t. Remove one means of committing suicide and those who want to take their own life will find another way to do so.

And don’t even get me started on the horribly flawed claims about violent crime, especially when we know that criminals aren’t buying their guns in gun stores in the first place.

The truth is that this bill, despite all the claims and citations of flawed studies, is a non-starter for most people because we all can see the pitfalls. This went nowhere in the last session in Pennsylvania and there’s not much chance of it doing better this time around.

The fact that Cappelletti also told the news that 1,600 lives are taken each year including via–get this–police shootings shows just how low she will go. That’s right, she’s using police shootings to justify gun control despite the fact that gun control laws generally don’t apply to law enforcement agencies in the first place.

Frankly, it’s disgusting and her waiting period proposal should wait an eternity before becoming law on those grounds alone.

The fact that it’s also an infringement on people’s gun rights is just one more reason this should die a fiery death.

And it would be great to see Pennsylvania voters start removing these morons from office. This nonsense won’t pass the Bruen test for history, text, and tradition in the first place, so it’s well beyond time to see this put down like a rabid dog and these lawmakers removed from office once and for all.