Misfiring Kenney doesn’t learn from experience

Our pathetic excuse for a retired-in-place mayor was given some space on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s letters page to plead (again) for an abridgment of your Constitutional right to own firearms.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear oral arguments, says Jim Kenney, on Crawford v Commonwealth. “The court will decide whether to overturn the provisions of the Pennsylvania Uniform Firearms Act that preempt, or prevent, the city from enacting common sense gun measures in Philadelphia.”

“Common sense” is in the eye of the beholder, and is usually used to disguise something unpalatable. 

The Uniform Firearms Act provides that the state writes the laws on firearms. Why? To prevent a bewildering patchwork of conflicting laws in towns across the Commonwealth. 

The case will raise objections from what Kenney calls “gun extremists who will tell us that local laws restricting possession violate Constitutional rights, most prominently the Second Amendment right to bear arms.”

This doesn’t overturn the Second Amendment, says Kenney, the noted Constitutional scholar.

Wait! He is not a noted Constitutional scholar, he is just a cheesy Woke politician who lives in his own reality. He doesn’t learn from experience, because the city has wasted time and money in the past trying to subvert 2A – the Second Amendment. In case you have forgotten it, here it is:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Note the last four words: Shall not be infringed.

The U.S. Supreme Court, even before the conservative majority, had upheld that right and knocked down local laws that infringed on that right. The court decided that the  “well-regulated militia” phrasing referred to the people themselves. 

But wait — it gets even worse for Kenney in the Pennsylvania state constitution.

Article I, section 21: “The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.”

Note the last four words: Shall not be questioned.

That is even stronger than 2A, and is as plain as the somewhat large nose on Kenney’s red face.

Faced (no pun intended) with such straight-forward language, the spineless mayor resorts (again) to the race card.

“There is nothing ‘uniform’ about a law that allows gun violence to disproportionately impact [here it comes] communities of color and people living in poverty,” he says.

So here he blames the gun, rather than the perpetrators, in the “communities of color,” where the perpetrators are almost always Black. And the perps seldom use firearms acquired legally, so piling another law atop existing law is unlikely to change anything. 

We have people living in poverty across the Commonwealth, but they don’t have murder rates like Philadelphia. 

What Kenney doesn’t understand is that people in Philadelphia need firearms for self defense, and that basic right is guaranteed in both the U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions.

I know his game plan.

He is hoping the 4-2 Democratic majority in the state supreme court may see it his way.

But they can’t, not if they respect the plain language of the constitution.