Pennsylvania Lawmakers Set to Make Gun-Owners a “Protected Class”

Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers have put their heads together and have written a piece of legislation that is sure to explode the heads of many, many snowflakes around the country.

It’s known as House Bill 38 in Harrisburg and its intention is to be an in-your-face response to the idiotic and baseless claims that law-abiding gun owners in the state of Pennsylvania are somehow responsible for the violence begin perpetrated by illegally owned and ill-gotten weapons by criminals.  CeaseFirePA is a Leftist organization that is laser-focused on ending the Second Amendment.  They advocate for the repeal of the amendment and argue that anyone who owns a weapon is potentially a danger to themselves and everyone around them.  Never mind the abundance of decades of statistics, reports and information that continuously upholds the NRA’s claims that legal and finely-trained gun owners actually lower crime statistics and prevent more crimes than are committed annually.  Remember the first rule of Leftism:  Facts don’t matter.  If you doubt that, just look at the Global Warming hysteria.

Shira Goodman is the Executive Director of CeaseFirePA and is just fired-up over the latest attempt by lawmakers in Pennsylvania at trying to thwart the rights of local businesses by allowing the possession of guns of open-carry employees and individuals on the properties of said businesses.  As it stands right now, businesses have a right to ban such weapons from their premises, but lawmakers appear to disagree that this should be the case, considering that it is the legal right under the Second Amendment to own and carry such weapons.

With the spate of violence that has been trending in public places these days, it is incumbent upon citizens to protect themselves in legal fashion.  Many unreported incidences of such thwarting of criminals are swept under the rug by Progressives, but are not forgotten by statistical research.  So, even when the news of a Good Samaritan stopping a crime in progress with his own weapon occurs and is ignored by the mainstream media, nevertheless, the information is collated into a database.

CeaseFirePA’s Goodman wants you to believe that such information is not relevant to the argument.  She is tunnel-vision set on removing the right to bear arms and will not stop with mere facts as an obstacle to her goal.

Pennsylvania is considering making gun owners a protected class of citizens with proposed changes to the Pennsylvania Human Rights Act (PHRA). 

The new bill, which was introduced by two dozen Republican representatives and one Democrat, would prevent employers from discriminating against employees who own or carry firearms. House Bill 38 is currently in committee, but if it makes its way through the legislature, it could have a major impact on the workplace.

Although there aren’t many known cases in which an employer has discriminated against an employee for exercising Second Amendment rights, there has been some debate concerning employees keeping guns in their vehicles on employer property. Current law allows employers, or any private property owners, to forbid guns on their property, even if those guns are lawfully owned and contained in private vehicles. The issue has caused a rift, and House Bill 38 may be a way to work around the issue, explained Shira Goodman, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a group aimed at working with law enforcement and community organizations to prevent gun violence in the state.

“The Second Amendment right is not overly burdened here, and so why (gun carriers) need to be in a protected class is just a little bit mind-boggling,” Goodman told the Pennsylvania Record. “It’s very easy to get a gun here. We’re an open-carry state, except for Philadelphia. It’s not very hard to get a concealed carry license. We don’t have waiting periods. We don’t have registration and license.”

Goodman explained that by making gun owners a protected class, private property owners and employers would no longer be able to prevent gun-toting employees from having firearms with them (at least in their vehicles) while at work.

“The issue is, there are some places that don’t want guns on their property—private property owners, private employers, and for good reason,” Goodman said. “They are worried about workplace violence, they are worried about domestic instances spilling over into workplaces. We see that all the time.”

Hold on a second! We see that all the time? Really. The last two headline instances of “workplace violence” were the San Bernardino Muslim couple who killed a bunch of Americans in a terrorist attack with weapons taken from their home illegally into the workplace in California where it wasn’t allowed. The second was on a military post at Fort Hood where a Colonel in the United States Army took a weapon and began shooting up soldiers. On a base, mind you, where soldiers are unarmed and weapons are stored securely in an armory by serial number. They both required weapons to halt their rampage. Did advocacy stop them? Did signs halt them from killing? Did a waiting period end their hopes of murder? Did not allowing them to carry on public or government property have a hope of forcing them to stop at the entrance and turn away?

Goodman says that including gun owners in the PHRA doesn’t make a lot of sense, so she believes it’s likely the legislation was introduced to work around current laws that allow private property owners to decide whether or not to allow firearms on their property.

“I think it’s really just an end run around this parking lot situation,” Goodman said. “The right to bear arms is a pretty robust right in Pennsylvania, and the language in our constitution is even broader than the language in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

There is a reason why Americans become so “nervous” when they see a law-abiding citizen open carrying a weapon. It’s not because they are inherently dangerous. It is because Leftism has convinced us that all who carry a weapon (including police officers, if you’ve been following Black Lives Matter advocates) are maniacs with intentions of gunning down innocent people. When an open-carry individual recently walked into a large retail outlet, he was denied entry by the manager who told him that it was making the customers nervous. He answered with, “It’s not my responsibility to guide their feelings. I’m not breaking any law.” As it turns out, the police were called and, when they arrived, informed the manager that the gun owner was within his Constitutional right to carry. They can’t by law ask him for ID or for his license and clearly knew they were treading on thin ice. The man responded by exiting the store, but requested that the store manager bone up on his knowledge of what was lawful and what was not.

Non-violence in a situation where a legal gun-owning individual was exercising his right to carry in a public facility.

Imagine that.

Source: Penn Record