PA Town Voted Down Gun Store Free Zones Around Schools

For some reason, areas around schools are often treated like sacred spaces. Certain businesses aren’t allowed to be conducted within so many feet of a school, sometimes for good reason. Adult-themed stores, for example, are probably not the ideal business a parent would like their child to walk past twice a day. Liquor stores might have drunks driving recklessly in the area as well.

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I don’t necessarily agree with the reasoning, of course, but I can kind of understand it.

Well, a Pennsylvania town is voted on a measure that would treat gun stores the exact same way.

 Lancaster Country Day School Administrators firmly believe they are trying to protect anyone who walks through their doors.

“Without students feeling safe, they won’t be at their best during school day and neither will teachers and staff,” Assistant Head Todd Trout said.

The school submitted a proposal to Manheim Township Commissioners in September that would create a one-thousand-foot buffer zone around schools. Gun shops and even images of guns would be prohibited inside the zones.

Trout said they submitted the proposal because of concerns with the Gun Gallery, a firearm retailer that opened near the school in 2018.

“There was a heightened concern about safety and security,” Trout said. “There have been numerous mass shootings through the country. There was one just before [Gun Gallery] opened up. You could tell people were concerned and asking, ‘Is that what we want near our school?’”

The town council voted not to proceed, thankfully, but I can’t help but get a little hung up on the fact that it got this close in the first place.

First, proximity to a gun store has never been indicative of anything, especially in regard to crime. Trust me, if it was, the anti-gunners would be beating that drum endlessly. The fact that they’re not tells me there’s been no study to even hint at such a thing.

No, what happened is that guns and gun owners are so acceptable to demonize and that people like Mr. Trout are so easy to manipulate that they actually bought into this nonsense, then tried to get the town to pass this.

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The presence of a gun store is nothing more than the presence of a retail business that caters to law-abiding adults. Guns have played a roll in protecting not just this great nation as a whole, but countless individuals since colonial times. This isn’t something that should have even been considered in the first place.

However, it was.

What that tells us is that anti-gun smear campaigns have been very successful in parts of Pennsylvania as well as other parts of the nation. The anti-gunners have done a fantastic job of convincing people that lawful gun sales lead to violence and violent crime, so much so that law-abiding businesses are being threatened and restricted because of irrational fears.

That just helps feed the gun control beast even further, especially as there’s rarely any pushback.

Yes, the town didn’t proceed with the proposal, but how much was that it was idiotic and how much of it had to do with concerns of running afoul of Pennsylvania’s preemption law?

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