Alphecca

Getting A Gun: PA vs NJ

New Jersey has long blamed Pennsylvania's gun laws for their crime problem. No news there since many states with high crime rates tend to do that. New York blames Virginia, Massachusetts blames New Hampshire and Vermont, Canada blames the entire United States...

N.J. resident Monica Yant Kinney is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and has a rather complex column in yesterday's edition about her "experiment" to obtain a permit to purchase a firearm. She starts off by contrasting the ease of purchasing a gun in neighboring Pennsylvania with her ordeal in New Jersey:

The wait is over. Eight weeks and six days after applying for a New Jersey Firearms Purchaser Identification Card and handgun purchase permit, I got them. So ends the experiment that Tom Ferrick and I conducted in May.

He bought two weapons within minutes the day he ventured out on a whim to test Pennsylvania's embarrassingly lame gun laws. Had he the money or motive, Ferrick could have outfitted a militia with a single swipe of the company credit card.

Me? I had to spend the summer sweating over whether the Haddonfield Police Department would give me the go-ahead to go gun shopping.

Let me address that middle paragraph. The only (as Brady Bunch types would lament) permit or license requirements in the Keystone State regarding firearms is one for concealed carry. Otherwise, as in many states, you can buy and own what you want. This is, in fact, encoded in the state constitution which says:

"The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned." Article 1, Section 21.

If you only read the Philadelphia Inquirer you'd be led to believe that the state is under siege of violence and random gun crime. Well, it is -- in Philadelphia, but that's about it. And guess what? Probably 90% of that is the result of out-of-control street gangs.

The third paragraph is about Kinney's long wait to be approved by her local police department in New Jersey to exercise her constitutional and God-given right to defend herself. New Jersey has no state constitutional support of the right to keep and bear arms. You can't (legally) even gift a .22 to your son or daughter without a firearms I.D. ownership card and license by the local police. New Jersey has brutally tough gun control laws.

I said that this is a complex article because Kinney presents some statistics about firearm murders but contrasts only those of Philadelphia with those of a far wider swath in Southern New Jersey. Needless to say, the rate is alarmingly higher in the City of Brotherly Love. But regarding the long N.J. process she also says:

Personally, I didn't mind the wait. But does anyone really think the world is safer because a suburban mom had to think long and hard about getting armed and dangerous?

If you've been following the fireworks lately, you know better.

While I worried about background checks and personal references, kids and creeps have been blowing one another away with weapons they most definitely did not acquire by filling out forms at their local police station.

In New Jersey, to get that permit [to exercise your rights], you must undergo a lengthy investigation including providing non-relative references. She details some of the questions asked:

Question 9: Is the applicant an alcoholic? Question 10: Is the applicant a habitual drunkard?

Suddenly, I'm rethinking every beer I've downed on my deck.

Question 14 wanted to know whether I'm an anarchist. Question 16, if I'm now, or ever have been, "treated or observed" for any mental condition.

That one got me thinking. Could the authors of the Constitution have intended to deny Second Amendment rights to women who have suffered baby blues or men who take Prozac?

Today's leaders think it's better to be safe than sorry.

"If we get two people who say you shouldn't have a gun, we're probably going to deny you," Detective Sgt. Gary Pearce explains. "You can always go to Superior Court to appeal."

At the end of June, Pearce dropped by the house, asking my husband if he knew of my plans and if he approved.

Initially, I'm horrified. What if we had a bad marriage, and I wanted the gun for self-protection? Why should he get to overrule my decision?

Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women, sees it differently. It's never wise to bring firepower into an abusive household, she says. And if New Jersey's law requires spousal notification, victims get time to prepare - or leave.

"It's a very thoughtful law," Gandy tells me by phone. "Yes, it makes it harder for people who aren't criminals or violent to get a gun. But, at the same time, it makes it harder for the people who are."

So... Gandy feels that the rights of self-defense by the law-abiding should be abridged because there are mutants in the world. As one commenter posted here a while back, this presumes you are guilty until proven not. The laws assume that everyone is bad until they can demonstrate otherwise.

Kinney concludes:

Which brings us back to reality. While Pearce and I finish business at the station Wednesday, Philadelphia's death toll is rising by the hour.

Pearce says he supports gun rights but thinks the lengthy application process in New Jersey can help to keep weapons "out of the wrong hands."

"But," he adds, "I don't think it really stops it."

We both know where hotheaded kids looking to settle scores get their guns: on the street, in either state.

And in fact, a casual search on any web engine for "guns" or "firearms" also brings up a slew of news stories about firearms stolen from homes and businesses.

Comparing a city of 1.6 million in PA to a rather more sparsely populated region of N.J. is certainly an unfair way to play with crime statistics. Kinney seems to be griping about gun laws in N.J. while at the same time "demonstrating", so to speak, that those same laws result in less murder in the state. I don't think, though, that she's doing it on purpose. I think she's trying to provide some balance in her column by contrast but she goes about it wrong; she should have -- after pointing out the draconian gun license laws of her state -- gone on to showing street gang murder in the cities of N.J. are out of control as I do in this post which claims that N.J. has 17,000 gang members. Of course, the article mentioned in that post also blamed PA for lenient gun laws.

By the way, for all that supposed leniency, it is still illegal for a gun dealer to sell a HANDGUN (the preferred choice of gang bangers) to out-of-state residents unless the transfer is completed by an FFL dealer in the buyer's home state.

In conclusion, I tried to get a sense of Monica Yant Kinney's own (personal) view on gun ownership and 2nd Amendment rights by reading some of her other columns and for the ones still available for free, found no other references other than discussions about crime in general.

I think that she, and this column, provide balance in the overall discussion about gun control. There are faults, but not those of the hysterical anti-gun types usually opining (or writing actual "news stories") that the Philadelphia Inquirer usually features.

If you take her column, along with actual statistics of the whole states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey into account, you find that for all of N.J.'s ponderous gun control laws, there isn't much difference between the violence perpetrated by city gang violence and the lack of it in most other areas of the respective states. If you consider what they call overall "violent crime" rates, PA is 23rd and NJ is 25th in the nation.

So what does THAT tell us? In my opinion, it's that handgun control (which is really what this is all about since that is the preferred firearm for thugs) has little effect. Maybe both states, their politicians and newspaper writers, should focus more on criminal control. Making the law-abiding jump through hoops to defend themselves doesn't lessen crime because those who commit crimes walk around those hoops. I think but don't know that that was the thrust of Kinney's column. Around here at Alphecca, it's mine, too.

There's another thing to consider. Here in Vermont, there are no permits or licenses at all and yet VT is pretty damn safe to live in. What's the difference? Vermont has a very low (as in least or almost least in the country) number of... well, the type of people who typically make up the membership of street and drug gangs. I'll leave it at that.

Posted by Jeff Soyer at July 24, 2006 11:06 AM