Pennsylvania State Representative Emily Kinkead (D-Pittsburgh) announced on Friday that she will sponsor a bill to require residents to obtain permits to buy guns.
Her legislation is a companion to a Senate measure authored by Art Haywood (D-Philadelphia). The senator began touting his legislation the day after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers.
Kinkead and Haywood are seeking to amend Title 18, Pennsylvania’s criminal code, to stipulate that anyone preparing to purchase a firearm to apply for a police- or sheriff-issued permit. The state already administers licenses that allow a resident to carry guns they possess; anyone aged at least 21 years who has a clean record can acquire the latter. The purchasing permit would apply to those who are at least 18 years old.
“We must act to #EndGunViolence but my #GOP colleagues are instead playing games with people’s lives,” Kinkead tweeted on Friday.
In that post, she retweeted an assertion by Governor Tom Wolf (D) that the Keystone State suffered a “mass shooting” once every 10 days on average in 2020. It’s not clear how he defined mass shooting in order to make that claim. His figure roughly squares with data from the Gun Violence Archive, a D.C.-based nonprofit, indicating that 34 mass shootings took place in the commonwealth in 2020, yet 23 of those incidents resulted in no deaths.
A 2021 report on mass shootings in the U.S. by the Rand Corporation noted that researchers have “no standard definition of what constitutes a mass shooting, and different data sources – such as media outlets, academic researchers, and law enforcement agencies – frequently use different definitions when discussing and analyzing mass shootings.” According to the Rand study, while the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as a gunfire incident in which “four people fatally or nonfatally injured (excluding shooter),” most entities studying the subject place the threshold at three or four deaths.
In a memorandum on her bill, Kinkead reiterated an argument Haywood made at the time he proposed his version: The Johns Hopkins Center on Gun Policy and Research found that Missouri saw gun-related killings rise after that state repealed its own permit-to-purchase law in 2007.
In an interview with The Pennsylvania Daily Star after Haywood announced he was drafting his bill, John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center called the contention about Missouri “a very misleading claim.” Lott’s own research on purchasing permits showed that while murders increased by 17 percent in the five years subsequent to Missouri’s repeal, they rose by almost one-third before that point.
– – –
Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Gun Show” by M&R Glasgow. CC BY 2.0.
You have to ask yourself why these leftist democrats have chosen to ignore the Supreme Court and are going full speed ahead in their quest to disarm American citizens.
If you know anything about history it’s pretty obvious.
This is ridiculous. We’ve had firearm laws on the books for years. Just enforce the old laws and forget about creating new ones that will do nothing but create a black market in guns at our southern border. The country has been flooded with AR type rifles. Now the Socialists who’re running our government and pretty much calling the shots. Being somewhat of a traditionalist I prefer classical looking rifles with wooden stocks. In fact I prefer bolt action but others might not so it’s just a case of to each his own. And another thing. Any older person who studied history would know why the Second Amendment was created in the first place. Two reasons. First, to protect the First Amendment and second and a very important reason, to give the citizens of the U.S. the power to protect themselves from a totalitarian government. A government like we NOW HAVE! I’m an old man in my late 90s. I served in combat during our last DECLARED war. The last on we actually won. I don’t mean to take away from those who served in Korea, Viet Nam and the Middle East because those men spent their time in Hell, too. They had to follow orders given by a bunch of idiotic politicians who wanted to play general. Those who served took an oath to defend our country and Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. My oath never expired so I will stand. Hopefully those younger men will do the same because this country is in big trouble and has absolutely no leadership.
I have already obtained my gun purchase permit.
At the top, it says “Constitution of the United States of America.”
It’s always fun watching libs soil their panties having to pay the NRA millions in legal fees as in McDonald vs. City of Chicago ND Heller vs. D.c.
Apparently, she is ignorant of the SCOTUS ruling on the meaning of the 2nd amendment.
Flat out, her attempted legislation is Unconstitutional, and is right up there with the old ‘Poll Tax’ of yesteryear.
What part of “Shall not be infringed” do they not understand?
If it is up to the democratic liberals, they would change the meaning of “infringed” to fit their agenda, just like they did to the word “recession.”