One major problem with many laws is that the people who create them don't actually know anything about the subject they're trying to legislate. They hear testimony from biased sources, only listen to the stuff coming from their side, then create laws premised on those biases, often without any understanding of the real world.
So you might be glad to see when lawmakers try to take a step that looks like them getting a total picture of the problem with recommendations from experts to guide them.
Unfortunately, those experts are generally the same ones offering the biased testimony, just now doing it on the taxpayer's dime, and in Pennsylvania, that means doing that to try to justify infringements on our right to keep and bear arms.
An attempt by some anti-gun Democrats in the Pennsylvania legislature to institute additional firearms restrictions through a “backdoor” strategy has one major gun-rights group sounding the alarm to its members.
HB 2018 creates a “Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board” that expands information-sharing authority among law enforcement, courts, and a new review board. And according to the group Gun Owners Of America (GOA), if passed, the law leaves plenty of wiggle room to institute additional gun control measures.
“This bill creates a centralized data-analysis apparatus that can later be use to argue that ‘system failures’ include lack of gun confiscation, that background checks are insufficient, that PFA firearm surrender rules should be expanded and that Red Flag Gun Confiscation Orders are ‘necessary,’” GOA’s Pennsylvania President Val Finnell wrote in a state alert.
As Finnell further pointed out, the measure would also allow review teams and the Board to recommend “changes in legislation, regulations, and policies.”
No doubt.
Granted, I don't see this as a backdoor gun control effort, as the title of that piece argues, but I actually see it as something more insidious.
This is about a panel being created that would make recommendations. In theory, this would be an entity that would get a certain degree of authority as they'll be looking at the data and making determinations, ostensibly based purely on the data. However, we all know that won't be the case. We've seen too much from the kind of people who would make up a board like this that tells us they see gun control as the ultimate solution to any problem with violence.
So Finnell is right that it'll eventually recommend all kinds of gun control, including things making red flag laws easier to get, among others.
But what's more insidious is how anti-gunners in other states might view this. What this panel recommends is likely to be used to justify gun control elsewhere under the guise of this being an unbiased panel simply looking at the data, data which might be specific to Pennsylvania, but would arguably reflect some of the same issues other states face.
In other words, while the board couldn't push through gun control on its own, it would justify the passage of almost anything, and not just in the Keystone State.
That's worrying, to say the least.
I hope it doesn't happen, but I'm not sure Pennsylvania has the pro-gun will in place to prevent it.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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