Classical Values :: Nutter compares self to founders, breaks laws, declares independence, and embellishes resume!

April 11, 2008

Nutter compares self to founders, breaks laws, declares independence, and embellishes resume!

Sorry for the busy title, but Philadelphia Mayor Nutter has been a busy man.

Not that he shouldn't be busy. In the wake of a plague of random attacks -- one fatal -- on Philadelphia commuters, a lot of Philadelphians want something done.

So what does Mayor Michael Nutter do?

He "defiantly signs" unconstitutional gun laws, which nearly everyone admits violate Pennsylvania state law. Moreover, while thumbing his nose at the Second Amendment, he compares himself to the Founders.

Council's measures appear to fly in the face of state law and legal precedent. The NRA says it will sue.

By Jeff Shields

Inquirer Staff Writer
Mayor Nutter likened himself and City Council members yesterday to the band of rebels who formed this country as he signed five new gun-control laws that defy the state legislature and legal precedent.

"Almost 232 years ago, a group of concerned Americans took matters in their own hands and did what they needed to do by declaring that the time had come for a change," Nutter said as he signed the bills in front of a table of confiscated weapons outside the police evidence room in City Hall.

"We are going to make ourselves independent of the violence that's been taking place in this city for far too long," he said.

Tell beating death victim Sean Patrick Conroy and the other commuters that the city will soon be "independent of violence."

This symbolic act of "defiance" is a costly move for Philadelphia, as gun owners will sue, and of course they will win.

He and Council are in for a fight, however. The city has tried and failed for three decades to buck the 1974 state law that reserves gun regulation to the state legislature. The state's preeminence appeared to be cemented in a 1996 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the legislature to prevent Philadelphia and Pittsburgh from enacting local gun laws.

Wrong. The cement is to be found not in a court ruling, but in state law -- specifically Pennsylvania 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 6120(a) -- a 1994 statute which provides as follows:

§ 6120. Limitation on municipal regulation of firearms and ammunition.

(a) General rule.--No county, municipality or township may in any manner regulate the lawful ownership, possession, transfer or transportation of firearms, ammunition or ammunition components when carried or transported for purposes not prohibited by the laws of this Commonwealth.

That statute is quite specific, and it does not exempt Philadelphia. Why the Inquirer advances the claim that the Supreme Court "appeared" to have "allowed" the law, I'm not sure.

Might they be hoping that the new Court will disallow the law?

The laws will of course promptly be challenged, and the legislature is being painted as the enemy. Of Philadelphia's right to unilaterally and unconstitutionally enact "change" I guess:

National Rifle Association spokesman John Hohenwarter said he expected the organization to sue "within a short time frame."

Kim Stolfer, vice chairman of the Pennsylvania Sportsmen's Association's legislative committee, said the organization was considering its legal options and suggested that the enactment of the laws was a criminal act.

"He's committing five misdemeanor crimes," Stolfer said. "What kind of message is he sending when he and City Council are willing to commit crimes for issues that are not going to work?"

Nutter and Council are not likely to find a great deal of support in the legislature.

State Representative John M. Perzel (R., Phila.) said through a spokesman that the laws were unconstitutional. House Speaker Dennis M. O'Brien (R. Phila.) did not return a call for comment, and State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (D., Phila.) declined to comment.

Even the city's fiercest proponent of stricter gun laws in the legislature, Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans, offered only lukewarm support.

Evans spokeswoman Johnna Pro said: "No one . . . feels the frustration" of city leaders more than Evans, so he would not criticize them.

But Evans, she said, also is a leader in the House of Representatives and "believes that everyone needs to allow the process to work, even though the process, at times, may be excruciatingly slow and incredibly unresponsive."

Phil Goldsmith, president of the gun-control advocacy group CeaseFire PA, said "it's worth trying" to enact and test the laws.

"It's a shame the city has to do something like this because the legislature has failed to exercise its responsibilities," Goldsmith said.

I like that. The Pennsylvania legislature has a responsibility to do what Goldsmith says. Although I agree it's a shame. A shame that the city's taxpayers have to see their money squandered defending blatantly illegal laws.

As Nutter admits, he doesn't care what the law says:

Nutter embraced the idea of taking "direct action" to challenge a legal status quo to protect city residents.

"If we all sat around bemoaning what the law was on a regular basis," Nutter said. "I'd probably still be picking cotton somewhere as opposed to being mayor of the city of Philadelphia."

Hmmm.... While I'd argue that challenging Nutter's illegal laws are a better way to protect city residents, I'm intrigued by the statement that he'd "still be picking cotton."

For a second there, I thought I'd been misinformed by the media about Michael Nutter. I had been led to believe that he was a middle class American, born and raised in Philadelphia. That he attended one of the finest prep schools in the Philadelphia area. And on top of that, a Wharton Business School grad. Sure enough, all of these details check out in his Wikipedia entry. His own campaign web page confirms the same details, adding that he worked as an investment banker. Not a word about manual labor, much less working in the cotton fields.

Baffling.

Americans love the "rags to riches" theme. Why would he omit something like that from his resume?

Can someone fill me in?

MORE: "FIGHTING CRIME" BY OPENLY BREAKING THE LAW. That's Glenn's reaction as he links Jeff Soyer's post on Nutter's madcap legislative crime spree. Notes Jeff wryly,

Worried about crime in his city, Philadelphia Mayor Nutter decides to join the fray and defy state law himself.

And here's Jeff on Nutter's claim that he's emulating the Founders:

Ah, yes, that band of rebels -- weren't they armed? . . .Until the Lobsterbacks confiscated their weapons, which is one reason we have the 2nd Amendment today?

Read it all.

MORE: Giving Nutter the benefit of the doubt, it occurs to me that Mayor Nutter might not be saying that he used to pick cotton, but that his ancestors did.

Let's assume it's a legitimate form of argument to claim that you did whatever you think your ancestors did. I'm of Norwegian descent. Does that mean I can claim that "If we all had sat around bemoaning the lack of opportunities in the New World, I'd probably still be raiding Irish villages and sacking monasteries"?

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has a great response to the claim that gun owners "overreact" to discussion of reasonable gun control, and he makes an excellent analogy to the First Amendment.

Many of the gun control advocates over the years have stated that their goal wasn't keeping guns out of the hands of criminals or the mentally ill, but to completely ban either all handguns, or all guns. See Professor Volokh's quotes of politicians promoting complete bans here, media sorts promoting complete bans, and advocacy groups promoting complete bans.

Imagine what your reaction would be to laws requiring newspapers to delay publishing columns for five days while the government checked the accuracy of the facts and quotes contained therein. (Think of all the minor errors of fact, libelous statements, and misleading information that would not be published.) Now, imagine your reaction if such a law was proposed amidst a continual whining for a complete ban on liberal media outlets. Would you find something a bit worrisome about that?

I'm reminded of the claim that "all we want to do is treat guns the way we treat cars."

Oh, yes, of course they do.

(Beginning with firearms training for teenagers in the schools, carry permits issued to 16 year olds, and more....)

posted by Eric on 04.11.08 at 09:08 AM

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Comments

Perusing the Assault Weapon ban

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/4748.pdf

i see that it bans all magazines that hold more than 16 rounds. so i propose we all grab an (empty) 30 round AR-15 magazine and parade up and down in front of City Hall.

Sean Sorrentino · April 11, 2008 06:18 PM

Don't be so literal. "I'd still be picking cotton" means that absent the civil rights struggle, a black man such as Mayor Nutter could not have advanced beyond menial labor. Now I doubt that is at entirely true - Philadelphia has had a free black population for 300 years and a few achieved fairly prominent positions in society, but what IS true is that there was a time, as recently as the 1960s, even in Philadelphia, always an anti-slavery bastion and the very opposite of the Jim Crow south, where a man such as Mayor Nutter could not have been elected mayor. So times have changed, but I'd say they changed BECAUSE OF and not in spite of the aspirations contained in our Constitution. Whereas gun control is no civil rights struggle - it is an effort to TAKE AWAY constitutionally protected rights. That is the essential difference, which Nutter seems to be missing entirely.

One of the things that the slave owners (and ex-slave owners in Jim Crow times) feared most was the arming of the black population. Only by maintaining a climate of fear enforced by unequal fire power could the deprivation of black civil rights be enforced. So it is ironic that Nutter considers taking guns AWAY from blacks (and make no mistake - that is what this is all about - trying to reduce the rate of gun violence by young black males) as a continuation of the civil rights struggle.

Nutter's methods are all wrong, but he is trying to respond to a real problem - there is a handgun murder, usually of a young black male by another young black male, almost every day in Philadelphia, sometimes a couple. Mostly these murders barely get any notice in the press, outside of a few lines in the police bulletin, unless the violence strays outside the ghetto and affects someone white and middle class (as in the stories you linked to above). But the truth is that really fixing this problem has nothing to do with changing the gun laws (there are rural counties in PA where every home has a weapon or two or ten, but gun murders are as rare as hen's teeth) but with inculcating those very "middle class" values which Rev. Wright rejects (first and foremost, respect for education and hard work) into the ghetto community. The majority of black males leave the Philadelphia school system without a high school diploma. After many years of schooling, they can often barely read and write or do basic level math. Of course, with out an education, the best career option is often drug dealing and other criminal activities. But changing gun laws is much easier than fixing a dysfunctional culture.

Jack Denver · April 13, 2008 01:23 PM

"as recently as the 1960s, even in Philadelphia, always an anti-slavery bastion and the very opposite of the Jim Crow south, where a man such as Mayor Nutter could not have been elected mayor."

But in the 1640s, a black man named da Sousa was elected to the Maryland legislature. History is not a steady progression, but often an ebb and flow.

Clayton E. Cramer · April 13, 2008 11:34 PM

It took me a couple of readings to realize that Nutter was his name and not a descriptor.

Phelps · April 14, 2008 04:48 PM