On Tap

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania residents… be scared. Your city council doesn’t give a damn about the state consitutition.

If your gun goes missing, you’d better report it, a Pittsburgh City Council majority declared yesterday in approving a measure designed to keep firearms from criminals, but also likely to keep lawyers busy.

Council’s legislation requires owners of lost or stolen guns to report that to police within 24 hours or face fines and possible imprisonment.

If it wins final approval next week and is ever enforced, it will likely end up in court, said Councilman Bruce Kraus, one of its authors. He welcomed the court fight.

“We know what we’re doing is activism,” he said. “It’s what we intended to do.”
…
“Who really cares about it being unconstitutional?” said Councilwoman Tonya Payne. “This is what’s right to do, and if this means that we have to go out and have a court battle, then that’s fine … We have plenty of dead bodies coming up in our streets every single day, and that is unacceptable.”

The violence in Pittsburgh is unacceptable, but this ordinance won’t do a single thing to prevent it. Here’s how the law is supposed to work:

A person buys a firearm for someone who isn’t legally permitted to own a gun. When the prohibited person uses the gun in the commission of a crime, police can trace the firearm purchase to the original buyer, who (we guess) will tell police that the gun was stolen or lost some time ago. The police say, “Why didn’t you tell us about it?”, and then the local District Attorney will prosecute the orginal buyer for violating Pittsburgh’s ordinance. If convicted, the original buyer will face a fine and the possibility of serving a few months in the county lockup.

The state of Pennsylvania already has laws against straw purchases on the books, and the punishment for engaging in a straw purchase can be as much as ten years in prison. So we’re supposed to believe that a fine and possibly months in jail will scare people straight more than the state punishment of a decade behind bars? Right.

There are two outrageous philosophies at work here. The first is the philosophy of “do something, even if it’s meaningless”. Councilwoman Payne knows darn well that this ordinance isn’t going to reduce violent crime. Yet she and five other members of the City Council cast their vote in favor of this ordinance yesterday because (in my opinion), they want to be seen as doing something about violent crime. If you’re only interested in appearing to be effective, rather than actually being effective, I don’t want you as my elected representative. Period. Don’t give me soundbite solutions that play well on the evening news but don’t actually make the city any safer.

The more troubling philosophy on display is the notion that the state constitution doesn’t matter. As John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts constitution:

In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

A government of laws… not of men. Lest you think it was only a grumpy old Federalist who felt that way, let me point out that the radical Thomas “Elephant Seal” Paine wrote something similar in Common Sense.

For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

This isn’t civil disobedience. This is civic disobedience, and there is no place for this in a nation of laws.

I can’t help but feel like civic illiteracy may be part of the problem as well. We need candidates at every level who understand and appreciate how we got here and the constant vigilance it takes to not lose the freedom so many of us take for granted.

Update

Sebastian at Snowflakes in Hell has more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at November 25, 2008 - 1:45 pm and is filed under Conservativism, Deep Thoughts, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.