When Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti told participants in a virtual town hall that she'd love a world where neither police nor citizens carried guns, she wasn't actively courting the gun control lobby. Those comments were made back in 2020, long before Cognetti announced her intent to challenge Republican congressman Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania's Eighth Congressional District.
Even so, given Cognetti's views on gun ownership, it's no surprise that the gun control group Giffords is pulling out all the stops to send Cognetti to Congress and advance her anti-Second Amendment agenda.
According to The Citizen's Voice, Giffords' PAC is spending $850,000 in support of Cognetti, though the bulk of that money appears to be going to ads bashing Bresnahan rather than touting Cognetti's commitment to gun control measures.
Thus far, the PAC has released two ads criticizing Bresnahan. Both attack the freshman congressman for accepting thousands in campaign donations “from the gun lobby,” and voting “for weaker gun laws.”
The first ad, titled “Corrupt,” was released last week, while the second ad, labeled “Hard Corner” was announced on Wednesday.
Bresnahan’s campaign responded to the ad and said gun owners will be backing his bid for a second term.
“Paige Cognetti, who hasn’t earned a single endorsement from a police union in her bid for Congress, said she’d love a world where police and citizens don’t carry guns, and then cut Scranton police ammunition funding in half while gang violence and violent crime surged,” said Peter Brath, campaign manager for Bresnahan, to The Center Square. “Now, a national gun-control group that wants to register the guns NEPA hunters and families already own is trying to bail her out from her own positions, and the gun owners here will see right through it.”
Emma Brown is complaining about Bresnahan getting "thousands" of dollars in support from the gun lobby, while her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars backing Cognetti? I'm pretty sure that's just blatant hypocrisy and not cognitive dissonance on the part of Brown, but either way, if Bresnahan is supposedly corrupt for accepting thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Second Amendment groups, what does it say about Cognetti that she's not saying a word about Giffords' spending nearly a million dollars in independent expenditures on her behalf?
Cognetti's campaign is pushing back on the idea that her 2020 comments reflect how she's governed Scranton, at least when it comes to the city's police department. Her campaign says that FBI and state crime statistics show that "violent crime is down under [her] leadership, and she has poured more than $5 million into local law enforcement and added five new officers to Scranton’s police force."
Here's some context for that $5 million figure. It isn't an increase in the police department's annual operating budget. According to the city, Cognetti's administration has spent $3.5 million in federal grants on police safety equipment and another $1.5 million upgrading the department's vehicle fleet. Scranton's 2026 budget also increased police operating spending by about $1.8 million over 2025 and included another $1.56 million in police capital spending. The 2025 police budget, though, was about $2 million less than 2024's budget. There is evidence behind Cognetti's claim, even if “poured more than $5 million into local law enforcement” makes it sound like the police department's annual budget grew by that amount when that wasn't the case.
As for Cognetti's boast about reducing crime, Scranton's pre-2021 crime statistics are muddied by acknowledged reporting and classification problems, making long-term comparisons difficult. But the most recent complete statistics show 248 violent crimes in 2025, up from 218 in 2024 and 236 in 2023. The website Crime Index also shows a 2.1 percent increase in violent crimes between January and June of this year compared to the first six months of 2025.
That apparently doesn't bother the anti-gun folks at Giffords one bit, but it should bother Scranton residents and PA-08 voters a great deal. Giffords may be spending $850,000 to convince voters that Bresnahan is the problem, but Cognetti’s own words make it pretty clear why the gun control lobby is so eager to put her in Congress.
