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Pro gun commentary published on Dickson Dozen

Mike

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Commentator states Philadelphia radio host Steve Corbett says Philadelphia has an ordiance against open carry and other localities should follow suit - obviously they miss the legal reality that there is no ordiance - just a hard coded requirement that open carriers hold a License to carry Firearms in Philadelphia, apparently obtained by Philadelphia legislators who don't trust their onw constituents.

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http://www.timesleader.com/pittstondispatch/news/Random_notes_on_the_news_05-24-2008.html

SMILES AND FROWNS

May 25
Random notes on the news

by JACK SMILES - jsmiles@psdispatch.com


On Friday, May 9 about a dozen people from the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association (PAFOA) carrying guns in holsters had dinner with their families at the Old Country Buffet in Dickson City. One of the other patrons called 911. The police arrived, handcuffed one of the gun guys and took his gun. Turns out the cops were wrong.


Until this happened I didn’t know that Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, meaning it is legal for persons who are not prohibited by law from owning guns to openly carry a handgun in plain sight with no license. “Openly” being the key word here. A permit is required to legally carry a concealed weapon.

Because I, and lots of other people including one lawyer I talked to, didn’t know that open-carry is legal, isn’t an excuse for the police not to know it and the Dickson City chief admitted he didn’t know.

But I’m not writing about this to criticize the police. I find this fascinating because it illustrates divergent ways of thinking.

Some people are horrified. They deride the gun-carriers – Who do they think they are, Wyatt Earp? What is this the Old West? This is Dickson, not Dodge City – like that.

On the Steve Corbett radio show, Corbett said that Philadelphia has a local ordinance against open-carry and that Dickson City and other towns should consider doing the same.

Then the Old Country Buffet put up a sign on the door. I’m not sure exactly what it said – that gun carriers wouldn’t be served or what – but it was an attempt to ban patrons from openly carrying guns in the restaurant.

Steve Corbett loved this because he believes that law-abiding citizens carrying guns made the restaurant unsafe.

I say exactly the opposite. That restaurant was never safer than it was for the hour or so that the PAFOA members were there having dinner. Criminals are mostly cowards, but they are not all stupid. They wouldn’t try an armed robbery in a place where a dozen law-abiding citizens are carrying guns.

That’s why, in my view, the sign banning guns is stupid. The sign might as well say: “Want to pull off an armed robbery. Come on in. We promise you’ll be the only ones with guns.”

And how is it that the Philadelphia ordinance against open-carrying makes Philadelphia safer than other parts of the state? Is Steve Corbett saying the safer place is the place where only the criminals have guns? Get it? Law-abiding citizens with guns are the problem, not criminals with guns.

It reminds me of Virginia Tech, which was by the decree of its administrators, a gun-free zone. Open-carriers and concealed-weapons permits holders were not allowed to take their guns on campus and were disciplined when they did. A bill was introduced in the Virginia state to allow permit-holders to carry guns on campus. When it was sidetracked, a Virginia Tech administrator cheered and said that students, professors and visitors would now “feel safe” on campus. And these people are educators?

As though Cho Seung-Hui, the VT killer, would stop and read a sign declaring VT a gun-free zone and then slap himself in the head and say “oh damn, I guess I can’t kill 35 people here today. I forgot this is a gun-free zone.” We all know how that worked out.

Who obeys laws? Who obeys rules? Law-abiding citizens.

All gun-free zones do, all ordinances against open-carry do, is guarantee that only the criminals and the nut-jobs will have guns.
 

Jersey Ron

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Mike, the complete IGNORANCE of gun laws in Pennsylvania by so-called law enforcement officalsand most citizens is absolutely mind boggling! It makes me wonder how many other laws are being mis-applied and mis-understood. I mean really! I was one of many that was literally told by the PSP that anyone caught with a firearm in PA with a Florida CCW would be arrested and they didn't care what the Attorney General Corbet said. And I quote in part: "We don't report to the AG!" This attitude reaches far and wide in PA.







Jersey
 

Renegade

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Mike wrote:
Who obeys laws? Who obeys rules? Law-abiding citizens.

All gun-free zones do, all ordinances against open-carry do, is guarantee that only the criminals and the nut-jobs will have guns.
The word is getting out there - let's keep the momentum heading in the right direction.

Phone calls, letters, conversation...they all add up!
 

Mike

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Yup - and Dickson City's police chief is digging himself a bigger hole - today admitting on the Sue Henry show that he was not planning on answering a Righ tto Know Act request over his plan to ration 911 call service only to businesses agreeing ban gun carry.

I wonder when somebody in Dickson City is going to get Chief Stadniski under some sort of control - he's a loose cannon!
 

Dutch Uncle

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I see no reason to try controlling the chief just now. He seems to be doing a great job proving he is a pinhead with little regard for the law, so we should let him go on until he has run out of STOOPID things to say (which might be a while). Then the local OCDOers can have some fun with him. :cool:
 

deepdiver

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Dutch Uncle wrote:
I see no reason to try controlling the chief just now. He seems to be doing a great job proving he is a pinhead with little regard for the law, so we should let him go on until he has run out of STOOPID things to say (which might be a while). Then the local OCDOers can have some fun with him. :cool:
That's been the gist of my thoughts as I have watched this trainwreck continue piling up.
 

scarletwahoo

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Mike wrote:
just a hard coded requirement that open carriers hold a License to carry Firearms in Philadelphia, apparently obtained by Philadelphia legislators who don't trust their onw constituents.

So I can open carry in Philly with my VA CCW?

Great article btw, especially the part about VT.
 

Jersey Ron

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It is LEGAL tocarry openlyin Philadelphia witha CCW/LTCF from a state that has reciprocity with PA but you can rest assure that you will be harrassed, detained and quite possibly arrested. The gun "culture" in Philadelphia is so bizarre that I don't even think MOST criminal lawyers are aware of the legality of Open Carry. Just my opinion. Philadelphia is criminal friendly, not law abiding friendly when it comes to guns.





Jersey
 

Pa. Patriot

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Jersey Ron wrote:
It is LEGAL tocarry openlyin Philadelphia witha CCW/LTCF from a state that has reciprocity with PA but you can rest assure that you will be harrassed, detained and quite possibly arrested. The gun "culture" in Philadelphia is so bizarre that I don't even think MOST criminal lawyers are aware of the legality of Open Carry. Just my opinion. Philadelphia is criminal friendly, not law abiding friendly when it comes to guns.

Jersey

You are very likely to be harrassed for OC in Phila.
I have OC'd in Phila a few times. Just Thursday the last time... But I'm not afiad of being unlawfully arrested ;)
 

Aran

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Pa. Patriot wrote:
Jersey Ron wrote:
It is LEGAL tocarry openlyin Philadelphia witha CCW/LTCF from a state that has reciprocity with PA but you can rest assure that you will be harrassed, detained and quite possibly arrested. The gun "culture" in Philadelphia is so bizarre that I don't even think MOST criminal lawyers are aware of the legality of Open Carry. Just my opinion. Philadelphia is criminal friendly, not law abiding friendly when it comes to guns.

Jersey

You are very likely to be harrassed for OC in Phila.
I have OC'd in Phila a few times. Just Thursday the last time... But I'm not afiad of being unlawfully arrested ;)
You go girl. :p
 

mjf

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Here's a link to Steve Corbett's article: http://wilknetwork.com/Pack-More-Brainpower-And-Less-Firepower/2186256


I have two suggestions until lawmakers come to their senses: If you see someone wearing a handgun in public, call 911. And if you own a restaurant or any other private business, ban all guns from the premises.

Using your head is always better than using your trigger finger.
One day I hope the 911 operator will say, "That's nice, open carry is legal and this number is for emergency use only."

I'm also guessing that only stupid people carry firearms? Sort of funny how those who preach tolerance are not very tolerant of my rights...
 

JimmyD8681

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Having been from Long Island, NY; I remember this incident like it was yesterday and I know that this would not have happened if patrons in the diner were carrying, concealed or open. I just pray that such a horrific incident does not happen again.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/707779/posts

[size=+1]NY--Diner Rampage-Release[/size]
Associated Press direct feed | June 28, 2002 | Frank Eltman


Posted on Friday, June 28, 2002 2:08:24 PM by NYer

NEW YORK (AP) _ A man who pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony counts in a horrific 1982 rampage of robbery, rape and assault in several Long Island communities was freed from prison on Friday, state officials said.
Robert Williams, 39, walked out of the Shawangunk maximum security prison in upstate Wallkill at 9:30 a.m., said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Correctional Services. Williams, who was sentenced to 15-30 years in prison, was released because he has served two-thirds of the 30 years, complied with prison rules and razuicipated in treatment programs. Four accomplices are still in prison.
The five men from Brooklyn stole a Cadillac and drove to a home in Plainview, on Long Island, where they raped, beat and robbed guests at a party. Later, they went to a diner in Westbury, where the men robbed and terrorized customers.
The attackers made their victims strip and ordered some to have sex with each other. Two men were shot and at least one waitress was raped. ``Nothing in my career ever compared to the magnitude of this crime and the acts of pure evil,'' former detective John F. Nolan told The New York Times in Friday's editions. ``This was degradation on a scale that was barbaric.''
After Williams' conviction, Nassau County District Attorney Denis E. Dillon successfully lobbied state lawmakers to change sentencing laws, making it possible for people convicted of multiple felonies, not including murder, to be sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison instead of the 15-30 years that Williams received. ``My office continues to support legislation to remove all caps on consecutive sentences in cases such as these,'' Dillon said in a statement.
Two of Williams' accomplices, Robert Samuels and James Martin, are serving life sentences after convictions on an unrelated murder. Robert Williams' brother, Michael, has enrolled in a sex offender treatment program that could lead to his release. The fifth man convicted in the attack, Bruce Garrison, is not being released because he has not enrolled in the sex offender program.
Robert Williams' name has been added to the state sex offender registry; he is expected to move to Brooklyn, where he will live with his wife and two of his three children, state parole officials told The Times.
``He will be supervised intensively by the Targeted Offender Program, which is a special offender unit of parole officers, who work with the New York Police Department and officers in the 73rd and 75th precincts,'' said Martin Cirincione, executive director of the New York State Division of Parole.
AP-ES-06-28-02 1358EDT
 

imperialism2024

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JimmyD8681 wrote:
Having been from Long Island, NY; I remember this incident like it was yesterday and I know that this would not have happened if patrons in the diner were carrying, concealed or open. I just pray that such a horrific incident does not happen again.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/707779/posts

[size="+1"]NY--Diner Rampage-Release[/size]
Associated Press direct feed | June 28, 2002 | Frank Eltman
Perhaps that story needs to get forwarded to all the Dickson City businesses who are eager to declare themselves as Gun-Free Zones...
 

deepdiver

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imperialism2024 wrote:
JimmyD8681 wrote:
Having been from Long Island, NY; I remember this incident like it was yesterday and I know that this would not have happened if patrons in the diner were carrying, concealed or open. I just pray that such a horrific incident does not happen again.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/707779/posts

[size="+1"]NY--Diner Rampage-Release[/size]
Associated Press direct feed | June 28, 2002 | Frank Eltman
Perhaps that story needs to get forwarded to all the Dickson City businesses who are eager to declare themselves as Gun-Free Zones...
+1 And cc'd to the city council, mayor and our favorite police chief.
 

JimmyD8681

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Let me also mention the Long Island Railroad Masacre... I remember that night as well, I was on my way to an Islanders hockey game at Nassau Coliseum with my younger brother who happened to take an earlier train home so he cango to the game. He usually took the 5:33 into Mineola. I also want to mention that I used to play MAA little league with Kevin McCarthy and his dad helped coach.

I know that if someone had been carrying there would have been less carnage and we would not have had to endure the trial where Colin Ferguson defended himself.

Gunfire

http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-history-hs9lirr,0,2928970.storyon the 5:33

Colin Ferguson opens fire on a rush-hour LIRR train, killing six in a shocking spree

By Paul Vitello | Newsday Columnist


The commuter train pulled out of the station carrying people of all kinds home from work on a Wednesday evening -- secretaries and stockbrokers and sellers and buyers and students, and in their laps were bags and bundles, and in their heads were all the thousands of threads of unfinished business that is human life in progress.

When it pulled into the Merillon Avenue
station in Garden City, 30 minutes later, that life was over. It was the "before" on the stranded side of a before-and-after dividing line gouged out of the lives of everyone there.

There were only two kinds of people left on the train, the living and the dead.

It is almost impossible to make sense of the acts of a madman. Psychiatrists and historians try. But most often it is left to the survivors and their families to salvage some vestige of meaning from the carnage of a loner like Jeffrey Dahmer or a leader like Pol Pot, or a paranoid gunman like Colin Ferguson, who got on a packed homebound Long Island Rail Road train on Dec. 7, 1993, and shot 25 people at point blank range to settle his imaginary scores with the world.


Six people died and 19 were wounded on the 5:33 out of Penn Station that evening. More might have been shot if two passengers had not tackled Ferguson as he paused to reload his gun.

Here was our homicidal postal worker. Our McDonald's gunman.

Of all the connections that have defined us as Americans in the past quarter century -- regardless of race, religion or time zone -- this was the most terrifying: the realization that at any time, at any place, our lives might end at the hands of a madman with a gun.

It is part of the culture, like jazz or baseball or the opportunity to become incredibly rich. There is the opportunity of sudden death by the Second Amendment.

That Ferguson
was a madman was not the universal judgment. A court said he was competent to stand trial, even competent to act as his own attorney. But anyone who saw him pacing before the jury in 1994, talking about the years-long racist government conspiracy against him -- scoffing at the 93-count indictment against him as a fiction based on the fact that "it matches the year 1993" -- could not help but see him that way.

He was probably crazy. Whether he was competent to stand trial, whether there is racism in America
, whether and how mental illness coincides with social ills are all interesting questions. But the questions that people really had to answer were tougher than those: How can you be sitting on a train one moment with a shopping bag full of Christmas presents between your feet and the next moment find yourself in the equivalent of a foxhole with the enemy coming over the top, killing you?

How could a man as disturbed as this one obtain a legal license to carry a firearm?

How could this happen? And happen over and over and over again -- in trains and fast food restaurants and post offices and tourist attractions and schools and on the streets every day -- each time triggering the same tired debate about the right to bear arms. We may ponder these questions from the safety of our intact lives. But the survivors and their families have had to tackle them in the flesh, in the trenches.

How they have answered them is as much a part of the story of the Long Island Rail Road Massacre as the massacre itself.

Among the survivors, Kevin McCarthy and his mother, Carolyn McCarthy, are probably the best known -- he for his miraculous recovery from a life-threatening head wound, she for her triple transformation from homemaker to widow, to gun-control advocate, to congresswoman. Her husband, Denis, was killed by the gunman.

Joyce Gorycki and her daughter moved away for a while from Long Island
to try to recover from the loss of their husband and father, James, one of the six killed. Then they moved back because this was where they had connections to the world. Joyce is an officer now in a statewide gun-control advocacy group.

Arlene and Jack LoCicero kept a vigil for five days at the bedside of their daughter, Amy LoCicero, whose thoratic artery was severed by one of Ferguson
's bullets. Amy was a religious young woman, which had helped sustain her in 1992 when, just married, she lost her 27-year-old husband to pancreatic cancer.

Now the parents struggled to maintain hope for Amy's life, then struggled to let go when they were told there was no hope, then decided on Dec. 12, after the doctors explained for them one more time the meaning of brain death, to donate her heart, kidneys and liver for transplants.

The heart went to an Islip
mother of seven, Theresa Caravella, whom Arlene would meet months later. "I was having a difficult time," Arlene said. "And I asked her if I could just hold her because she was so real and all the things that were happening to us were just so surreal ... And Theresa said, 'Remember, the heart that beats in me is the same heart that beat in your womb."'

That touched her. She'll never forget it.

The struggle of all the survivors, in a way, has been to re-establish connections to the world. The psychiatrists all tell you that when violence happens it leaves not only wounds of the flesh but the pain of isolation. How can anyone understand what they have been through? No one can.

It is as if Ferguson
, the madman, had been armed not only with bullets but with a contagion that threatened everyone he touched with becoming a stranger in a strange land like himself.

There are survivors who now, five years later, and probably forever, will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, reliving the moment when they looked up and saw his face.

"It was the most awful thing I ever saw," said Mary Anne Phillips, who was the first one wounded when Ferguson stood up, removed the semi-automatic pistol from his gym bag and began to shoot the people who by some accident of fate were sitting in the places where his mind saw enemies.

In her testimony before the jury, she described the look on Ferguson
's face as "searing." Outside in the hall, talking to reporters, she had used another word.

"Evil," she said.

Like many of the survivors, though, Kevin McCarthy still takes the railroad to work and home again. He is married now. He walks stiffly because of his injuries, but was recently seen trotting and weaving through the rush hour crowd at the Merillon Avenue Long Island Rail Road station, trying to catch his train, a bundle under his arm. And from the look of him, there were a hundred things on his mind.
 
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