We welcome the decision by the state Supreme Court to uphold a ruling that municipalities cannot pass tougher or more restrictive limitations on Pennsylvanians’ Second Amendment rights than state law.

The efforts by some communities to sidestep the wisdom of our state Legislature on these matters has carried grave risks to the rights of law-abiding gun owners — that they could see their state devolve into a patchwork of conflicting ordinances and laws about one of their God-given rights, enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

That confusion would have been an unacceptable burden for Pennsylvanians exercising their rights — a confusion Americans would clearly recognize as deplorable were it to be applied to any other liberty, whether it be the freedom to exercise religion, the right to due process, or any other.

And while we recognize the frustrations these types of ordinances would create for law-abiding gun owners, we remain skeptical that such ordinances would prove to be an effective deterrent or obstacle to any violent criminal who were to choose to arm themself.

As we have observed in the past, a better course of action than restricting a right enumerated in our Bill of Rights would be to better equip police, probationary and parole officers and the court system with the tools and resources necessary to punish criminals and investigate and mitigate recidivism.

We suspect this is even more true of inconsistant restrictions applying wildly different standards and expectations from township to borough to city, often over the course of short commutes.