Philly Politician is the One Misguided

Writing in the Philadelphia Enquirer, State Rep. David Levdansky attempts to explain how his gun control bill makes Good Sense. He employs all the right tactics:

First, off, to write an anti-gun piece intended for the General Public, one must list their "gunny cred":

Hunting, guns and the outdoors are in my ancestral blood, just as football runs through the veins of other fathers and sons. As a little kid, I eagerly awaited the day I could hunt and trap with my dad and uncles. I owned guns as soon as I was of legal age and love nothing more than still-hunting and stalking in pursuit of white-tailed deer. Now I share the family tradition of hunting with my two teenage sons.

Ok, fine. A bit more verbose than "I'm a gun owner too, but....", however the message is the same.

Next tactic, stir up painful memories and get the emotion flowing:

But growing up in the turbulent 1960s also taught me about the damage they can inflict in the wrong hands.

He goes on to list the high-profile assassinations of that decade, stirring up visions of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. Guaranteed to get the emotion going.

He then proceeds to make his case for the mandatory reporting of stolen handguns (third tactic):

The criminal who can't buy a handgun simply approaches someone on the street who has no felony record - maybe a crack addict or a hooker. The criminal gives that person money to buy a handgun for him. Later, if that handgun is recovered during a criminal investigation, the original purchaser simply claims it was stolen. Since no law requires the reporting of stolen handguns, that purchaser can keep selling his guns to shady characters and keep lying about it.

This, in a nutshell, it the reason for this bill and others like it proceeding through various State governments. doesn't sound bad, does it? Who wouldn't report a stolen firearm of any kind? Hell, I know I would.

So, the General Public nods its collective head and moves on to something else.

But, there's more to it than what you see here. What they gloss over is the fact that a person only has 72 hours in which to report the theft. Not hard to do if you've been broken in to, had your house ransacked, etc.

But what if that wasn't the case? I was talking this weekend to a co-worker that had his entire gun collection stolen from him when a relative and some of the relatives "friends" spent a weekend over at the house. He didn't know for a couple months, because it wasn't hunting season.

The reporting law would have made him a criminal. Maybe even a felon. See, there's the issue: this law is making criminals out of perfectly law-abiding citizens. That one of the "unintended" consequences of these laws, and that's why pro gun groups are against them.

And what about people who simply sell their guns to another private citizen? How would this law affect them? All they can say is "I sold it to a guy, but it wasn't that guy.". True or not, they would be off the hook until some other politician decides it's a "loophole" and moves to close it.

Just another step towards total gun control.

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