Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf is no friend of gun owners in the Keystone State. He’s offered support to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s illegal gun control laws and, by extension, tacit support for any other community that wants to test preemption in the state.
Now, he’s pushing for an increase in funding in what should be an innocuous program but is likely anything but.
Governor Tom Wolf is urging the General Assembly to approve $6 million to go toward reducing gun violence in Pennsylvania.
The money would be distributed as Community Gun Violence Prevention and Reduction grants, which are administered by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.​
Of course, anytime you hear “gun violence prevention or reduction” in this day and age, it’s usually safe to assume that they’re talking about gun control.
Yet the description sounds like it’s no such thing. Instead, the grant is for “community programs that focus on evidence-based strategies or promising practices” that the governor’s council on gun violence recommended. That sounds pretty innocuous.
However, that council on gun violence has made some initial recommendations and they’re about what you’d expect from a council built by an anti-gunner like Wolf.
Among their recommendations are mandatory reporting laws for lost or stolen firearms, mandatory storage laws, universal background checks, red flag laws, and expanding domestic violence to close what anti-gunners refer to as the “boyfriend loophole.”
Now, that’s not all they recommend. Also among all that gun control are a number of measures that include things like job programs and intervention programs.
One would expect the funding to go towards things like that, which are far less concerning from a Second Amendment standpoint.
The problem is, though, a committee that seems to believe all this gun control is somehow beneficial is a council I’m not sure I want to trust to find a grain of sand in the middle of the Sahara. If they think gun control is the way forward on these measures, I find myself needing to question everything else they’re proposing.
We know from past experience that gun control doesn’t actually work. All it does is interfere with the very people who aren’t likely to be a problem in the first place. The evil that walks among us will continue to get firearms despite all of those recommendations. They’ll steal them, buy them from others who stole them, make them, or whatever else they need to do in order to arm themselves. They simply don’t care about the law and never have.
That’s not going to change.
But Wolf still wants that. Further, there’s little reason to think that some of this tax money won’t be used to help push for laws that infringe on the rights of ordinary Pennsylvanians who just want to live their lives. That’s how people like Wolf roll, anyway.
Maybe it’s time for people like Wolf to focus on actually enforcing the laws on the books and stop trying to score leftist political points. Do that and watch what happens to the state’s violent crime rate.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/
https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/03/03/pn-governor-invested-gun-control/