Somewhere around 45 states have preemption laws on the books. These laws mean that local governments can’t enact their own gun control laws. All such measures have to come from the state legislature.
In Pennsylvania, they have a preemption law, but they also created some gun control laws specifically for Philadelphia. The city was able to get the state to pass measures for rules regarding concealed carry specific to the city. Those are being challenged, of course, but that’s how local gun control can come about in a preemption state.
The city of York, Pennsylvania, though, did something different. Rather than following the Philadelphia from back then and trying to get the state legislature to pass gun control for the city, they decided to follow Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia of today and just act unilaterally.
Now, they’re in court about it, and over at The Trace, the anti-gun cabal that calls themselves journalists are acting like this is really just a challenge of preemption. I mean, with a headline like, “This Small Pennsylvania City Is Challenging the State’s Control Over Local Gun Laws,” what else should we think?
In 2022, York, Pennsylvania, weathered 22 homicides, a record number of slayings that gave the growing industrial city of 45,000 a higher homicide rate than Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the state’s biggest cities.
One particularly brazen incident shocked officials into action. On July 6, 2022, Shaheim Carr, 27, left a house near downtown York. Four men chased Carr into a breezeway and fired nearly 100 bullets. The shots killed Carr and sprayed gunfire into nearby buildings, including into the home of the mother of York’s City Council president, Edquina Washington.
Among other incidents, the shooting prompted Washington to sponsor two gun-safety bills, despite pushback from gun rights supporters. One bill, approved last year, banned ghost guns, weapons that lack serial numbers. The other banned machine gun converters, including Glock switches, devices that modify handguns so that they can fire like fully automatic weapons. It was approved this September.
Before she pushed the two gun safety measures, Washington conferred with the Police Department and studied what was happening 100 miles east in Philadelphia. She learned that Philly had passed its own firearm restrictions. Now, York is among the handful of Pennsylvania jurisdictions that have been inspired by Philadelphia to ban ghost guns.
Let’s be real here, this isn’t some kind of challenge. York isn’t pushing boundaries here.
It’s breaking the law.
Preemption is the law. It’s been upheld time and time again as constitutional, too. There’s no means by which a local community can create its own gun control laws in the state of Pennsylvania, nor anywhere else that has preemption laws on the books.
This isn’t a challenge. It’s a crime.
No, no one is going to go to jail for breaking this law, for committing this crime, but that doesn’t mean this is some kind of righteous challenge of an unjust law. Especially considering the prohibitions under consideration are so extreme that they flies in the face of what the Supreme Court has actually said about so-called ghost guns. While they upheld the Biden-era rules regarding kits, it was also clear that the Court believed there was a constitutional right to make your own firearms if you so wish, and these bans essentially ignore that.
So this “challenge” is to break the law (preemption) because they really want to break another law (the Second Amendment), and The Trace seems to think they’re the ones in the right.
If you ever needed more reason to recognize that The Trace isn’t journalism, it’s activism, this should be plenty.
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