Gov. Tom Corbett heralded the new anti-law law, because of course he did.
If you live in Pennsylvania, your town isn't allowed to have gun safety laws anymore. This is because of (Ex.-)Gov. Tom Corbett, the National Rifle Association, and a collection of the usual fetishists who insist that their rights to [insert action here] with a loaded gun in their hand trumps any common-sense restrictions your community might want to put on them. Oh, and they don't have to live in your community to sue it for violatin' their right to shoot things. Or show that the rule harmed them. Or really anything, because America's least-regulated militia will not tolerate you fearing for your safety when it comes to
them and their toys:
[Obsessed lawyer guy] has sent letters to nearly 100 municipalities on behalf of four pro-gun group clients—American Gun Owners Alliance, Concerned Gun Owners of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvanians for Self Protection, and Firearms Owners Against Crime (FOAC)—notifying them that their gun laws could get them sued. By Prince's count, at least 45 towns have already repealed their gun ordinances or promised to, for fear of costly legal challenges.
This would be restrictions like not being allowed to shoot your gun within city limits (Pittsburgh) or a requirement that you report lost or stolen guns so that someone knows you've lost it (Allentown). And all of it is because Republicans shoved through the new your-town-can't-have-gun-laws bill into what had been a generic bill toughening laws against metal theft. This itself would be a violation of a Pennsylvania state constitutional requirement that each bill may only address one topic, which is why the Pennsylvania Attorney General
refused to defend the law in court, but it's still resulted in a flurry of repeals of basic gun safety laws by towns in the state that don't want to bear the expense of being sued.
So there's your report on the state of democracy in America. If you're a gun fetishist you still don't have to follow the same sort of common sense safety rules that might apply to cars or bicycles or microwave ovens because the NRA and other pseudo-militias simply don't want to, and if you're a lawmaker passing laws allowing for more guns in more places you don't have to follow all your other state laws because guns trump all, and we still have a lot of people getting shot accidentally by morons or intentionally by psychopaths and we still have no real intention of doing a damn thing about that because the morons and the psychopaths have their own goddamn lobbying groups.