Suck It Rendell

I ranted about this on Facebook, but it's worth ranting in public too. Rendell wants to

1) Allow municipalities to enact their own gun laws. This is old hat for him, and the Assembly soundly cracked his idea over the head last time. Frankly, it would be asinine to have only limited uniformity in gun laws across the state. Right now one can find and know the laws and abide. What happens when a person travels halfway across the state and every single township, borough, and city they pass through has its own rules, all hard to find and written as well as half the local laws I've ever seen? (My last township's income tax form says that people do not need to file a tax return unless they have income. It next says that everyone without income needs to file a tax return. Then it reminds us that people required to file will be fined $500 if they do not file. It's almost as sensible as the Georgia state income tax form that-- I kid you not-- said to "add or subtract" one line from another.) It just would not work. Did you just have a fender bender in a town that allows only unloaded weapons in cars? Oops! You should have run into that guy in the last town back instead, to keep yourself out of jail. Want to prevent people from traveling with their handguns? You would need to pay off only a few city council people in cities with interstate crossings to ban non-residents from transporting guns there instead of just paying off half plus one of the legislature to go DC on us. That sort of thing can't happen if the rules are uniform.

2) Ask Congress to re-enact a ban on "assault weapons." Let's look at that for moment, shall we? The federal "assault weapons" ban was a ban on a few specific models of semiautomatic firearms that looked like menacing military style weapons instead of consumer target, hunting, and defense weapons. The key here is looked like. A host of guns that work the same way-- semiautomatic actions-- were never banned. Fully automatic weapons-- the guns that actually work differently from the consumer weapons-- are already illegal among the general population under federal laws. So what exactly was the point? Yes, some police in Pittsburgh got themselves killed last week. That had nothing to do with the "AK-47" one of the shooters had. It was about police being called to a place to be ambushed. If they had been ambushed by people with swords or piano wire would we be wanting congress to outlaw knives and pianos? Or would we compromise and only outlaw knives that looked like electric knives or pianos that looked like player pianos?

I think Rendell needs to buy a clue before I am forced to buy an NRA membership.