Opinion
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- The Pennsylvania House has announced plans to take two anti-rights bills off the table and bring them to a vote on the House floor this Monday and Tuesday.
Rights supporters in Pennsylvania Must Act NOW!!!
If you live in Pennsylvania, your state representatives need to hear from you TODAY, letting them know that a “Yes” vote on HB 2227 and/or HB 2060 will result in serious repercussions at the polls, particularly for Republicans. If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, your friends in the Keystone State need to see this alert, so forward it to them right now.
The Republican leadership in the Pennsylvania State House is playing right into the hands of the anti-rights Democrats in this case. Republican Speaker Mike Turzai has been duped by a biased media and misleading polls into believing that voters want these bills. He and his colleagues are not looking at the most important political reality:
The only significant voting block driven by gun control related votes is GunVoters.
Any vote that is perceived by GunVoters to be even the slightest bit in opposition to gun rights, will result in angry GunVoters actively opposing those who voted wrong, and throngs of others will just throw up their hands in disgust and walk away from the backstabbing politicians – costing Republicans votes that they can’t afford in this critical election year.
- No Pennsylvania voter is going to switch their vote to Republican based on Republican support for these ill-conceived bills.
- No Pennsylvania voter is going to switch their vote to Democrat based on Republicans opposing these bad bills.
The only votes that will be lost or gained based on these bills are the votes of GunVoters, and GunVoters have proven over and over again a willingness to aggressively punish backstabbers at the polls, even if it means a less desirable candidate will win the seat. The politicians need to understand this. If they don’t understand it, then they need you to explain it to them.
HB 2060 and HB 2227 are supposedly intended to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, but in reality these bills focus on tools instead of focusing on the dangerous individuals. If someone is suicidal, knocking down their door and taking their guns is not going to make them less suicidal and does not remove their ability to do harm to themselves. In fact, such action is more likely to push them over the edge. Likewise, if someone is a serious threat to others, police intervention to take away their guns – not their knives, cars, chainsaws, flammable liquids, etc. – does nothing to prevent that dangerous person from committing a heinous crime. Police can never be sure that they’ve gotten all of an individuals guns, nor can they ensure that the person doesn’t have access to guns through other channels, and while guns are a popular tool for those bent on homicide, they are by no means the only tool that is readily available, nor the most effective. The worst mass murders in U.S. history did not involve guns as the primary weapon. The Happy Land murderer used a match and a dollar’s worth of gasoline to kill 87 people in 1990. Even one of the most often cited cases in support of these types of laws – the Isla Vista murders, in which a twisted little weasel killed 6 people in “retribution” for girls refusing to have sex with him (because he was a twisted little weasel) – half of the victims were stabbed to death, not shot. Taking the murderer’s guns away from him in advance of the rampage would probably have had little impact on the final outcome, and not necessarily a positive impact at that. On the other hand, taking the deranged little puke into custody and getting him some much needed mental health treatment might have saved all of those lives.
For more information about the problems and false promises of Extreme Risk Protection Orders, read this recent column on the subject. For more information on the specific bills in question, and to keep up with what’s going on in the Pennsylvania Legislature, go to www.foac-pac.org/State-Legislation-Talking-Points.
Firearms Owners Against Crime needs your support right now. Don’t put it off. If you live in Pennsylvania, Contact your State Representatives, your State Senators, your state Republican Party officials, and the Republican leadership in both houses, and demand that they stop this nonsense or face consequences in November. Giving Democrats what they want is not a way to win Republican elections!
If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, please forward this Alert to your friends who do. Post it on your social media pages and in the forums you frequent. We only have this weekend to get the word out and stop these bills. Please take action NOW
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About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.