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As new challenges to a long-standing ruling in Pennsylvania make their way to the state's Supreme Court, we reiterate that Judge Patricia McCullough is correct: The state Legislature has "a legitimate, countervailing government interest" to ensure that citizens "not be subjected to varying and different firearm regulations as they travel from town to town."
The efforts to reverse court rulings to allow municipalities to turn Pennsylvania into a patchwork quilt of different gun-control measures, as reported in Friday's Sun-Gazette by Angela Couloumbis and Stephen Caruso for Spotlight PA, may have a greater chance of success.
But the problems with the concept of Pennsylvania's cities, boroughs and townships being permitted to place their own limitations on gun owners remain clear. It is an unfair burden on law-abiding Pennsylvanians -- or, perhaps more accurately, non-violent Pennsylvanians who have no intention of violating the law, as giving each of Pennsylvania's 2,000-plus municipalities would surely lead to unintentional violations simply for crossing a borough-township line -- and more importantly is unlikely to make our schools, hospitals and other public places any safer.
The motivation for this push, as Spotlight PA reports, is inaction by the state Legislature. But as that Spotlight PA report also notes, in 2018 the state Legislature approved $70 million in state funding for school security.
The legislature in that year also amended laws so that police could seize firearms from Pennsylvanians convicted of domestic abuse.
While lawmakers' actions certainly didn't go as far as the actions proponents of gun control wish the state would take, that isn't inaction. Trying to get the policies they prefer at a municipal level to circumvent the elected Legislature, simply because the directly elected legislators share the skepticism a majority of rural Pennsylvanians have for many of new gun control measures isn't the responsible course of action.