I take more comfort in HR218 to tell you the truth. I can carry in all 50 states.
But I also have a couple of permits from other states. If I wasn’t a cop I could still carry in 30+ states. (But NOT in the state I reside/pay taxes in! F*cking insanity!).
The only way the Majikal Land 'O Cheeze get’s CCW is if the Republicans gain a veto proof majority in the legislature (HIGHLY improbably) or Mark Green gets elected Governor in November (possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it).
Man, you guys have it easy, to get a Arizona CCW, you have to go through hours of classroom instruction, and prove proficiency with your weapon. (The last part is pretty easy, though). Then the cost is more like $50.00 than 19.
All of the above is still better than New Jersey, which won’t issue CCPs to LEOs who work out of the Garden State. Go figure. 
I don’t understand your post. Law enforcement officers don’t need to have permits to carry.
For what it’s worth, link to the Philadelphia police website regarding the stated procedure for getting a permit.
I’ve always found it interesting that people who live here usually don’t refer to the place as “Philly” unless referring to a neighborhood with a direction appended (“West Philly,” “North Philly.”) I find it a little grating in the way that natives of San Francisco dislike “Frisco,” and frequently I find that when people start making general statements about this place called “Philly” they don’t generally match my experiences in Philadelphia.
While I certainly recognize the right to own firearms it’s a little disturbing to read people discussing bringing extra ones into my city specifically. What are you worried we’re going to do to you? The vast majority of residents aren’t carrying guns and unless you plan to start dealing drugs in certain specific areas already staked out by rivals I’m sure you’ll find you won’t need one.
Hmmmm. I lived in Lansdowne from 1984 to 1990. I went into West Philly each day for school. A classmate of mine was stabbed in West Philly. Many classmates were mugged. Many had their cars stolen.
I was lost once (driving) and ended up in a very bad area. Empty crack vials littered the sidewalk. A cop pulled me over and offered to escort me to safety. By comparison, the most dangerous neighborhood in Pittsburgh is nothing.
Foolish.
The 2 guys that damn near smashed my skull in with a piece of metal during an attempted mugging back in '93 didn’t have guns. I’m a bigger guy trained in defense tactics and I still couldn’t fight them off. Babble all you want about not needing a gun. Had I not had a Ruger P89 that scared them off, I may have ended up brain damaged…or worse!:eek:
But there’s not even a note of pending CCW, or any information on it. It seems to have last been updated last year sometime. Look, all I’m saying is for a site that is devoted to tracking these things, I would have thought that one of the biggest news items involving gun ownership in the State in the last…how many years? would have been noted.
I post on packing.org’s forum from time to time, and the general concensus is that the site is going downhill–pages not being updated, etc. The site’s owner apparently doesn’t have time anymore to keep it updated, so he switched to volunteers to keep each state’s page up. Some do a better job than others.
Shame too, because PDO used to be the place to go for CCW information.
I am a resident of Pennsylvania. I bring it to whatever city I happen to be going into within the law. Don’t feel singled out. Besides, it’s not extra. Had i not bought it where I live it may have been purchased there anyway. In fact, there’s no such thing as an “extra” gun. That implies total saturation, which is not the case.
Nothing. I’m not worried. The only obviously worried person here is you.
I don’t care about the “vast majority”. The vast majority of anything is innocuous. It’s the one lunatic that you need concern yourself with. If you point him out to me the next time I go to Philadelphia I’ll be glad to avoid him. If you can’t, well, I think you understand where I’m going with this.
Also, I think you’re deluding yourself into thinking that a lot of people aren’t carrying concealed weapons. The whole idea is that you can’t tell. You’ve passed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people just today with a gun on them.
Cite?! That idea is laughable! There is no way in hell I passed “hundreds” or “thousands” of people carrying a concealed weapon today. Not remotely true.
Yes, I am worried that people who misread the urban terrain (as it were) to this extent are inquiring about bringing additional guns (as in “they wouldn’t be here if you didn’t bring them”) into the city where I manage to live every day without the slightest bit of fear of the ‘lone lunatic’ or my fellow person in general. The fact of the matter is that primate behavior changes in more densely populated areas and as best as I can tell all of the people discussing this save me are rural or at best suburban. If you’re bringing a loaded gun here on the assumption that we have roving lunatics and thousands of people packin’ heat walking around every neighborhood then I think I have cause to be worried.
On the one hand you make an absurd claim about the large number of concealed weapons that I walked by today and on the other you assert that we don’t have “total saturation.” Which is it…?
I have to go to work right now, so this is all I have time for (of course, it would have to be John Lott, so take it for what it’s worth):
Add non-resident tourists who have reciprocal licenses and I am more than happy to stand by what I said.
Sigh!:rolleyes:
Typical gun grabber babble. They say “I believe in the right to bear arms”, but then rail against law abiding citizens actually “bearing” those arms.
From what I can find, about 6% of adults in Pennsylvania are licensed to carry a concealed handgun. Cite (sorry, best I can find). Now, not all of them are carrying every day but I’m sure a significant portion are.
Why does it bother you if adults who have passed state and federal background checks and have never commited a felony, never been diagnosed as mentally ill, and are not addicted to any mind-altering substance have decided to carry a handgun to protect themselves? Concealed handgun licensees are one of the most, if not the most, law abiding segments of society. In the first ten years of the Florida concealed handgun law, out of 355,000 permits issued only one licensee was convicted of homicide (Kleck, Gary. Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, p 370. Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997). Very few (109 from 1987 to 1999, out of 551,000 total) were revoked for firearms-related offenses, and most of those were non-violent, ie carrying a firearm into a restricted area (another John Lott cite). This is very similar to the experience of other states.
Carrying a handgun is not right for everyone. I’m not convinced that the introduction of concealed weapons laws decreases crime (I think economic and social changes have had more impact), but there is absolutely no evidence that it increases crime. My main concern is decreasing the crime rate against me, and a handgun is a tool for that.
On a lighter note, this is post number 100 for me. At this rate, it should only take me another 400 years to reach 10,000 posts. Yay!
I was away from the 'net for a couple of days…
There are 1,500,000 people in Philadelphia and according to your own post only 28,000 people hold permits. This is markedly less than the state average of 6% of adults you cite, and in fact as the largest city by far that actually means that the rest of Pennsylvania has a considerably higher rate of people permitted to carry in order to get up to the 6% figure. (How interesting that the people who live with less crime also apparently feel less safe!)
The odds of me passing “hundreds” or “thousands” of the 28,000 people - who might have not even have left home, or be carrying at any moment - as I go about my daily business are very slim indeed. It sounds as if that if *every single person who were permitted were carrying and out of their house at the same time * I’d have to pass about 54,000 people on the street before I’d have a break-even chance of reaching 100. I therefore repeat that the assertion that I pass hundreds or thousands of these people each day to be absurd.
Please do not refer to my opinions as “babble.” Take it to the Pit or don’t type it.
I’m also a bit curious as to how vetbridge thinks walking around with a gun would help his friends not have their cars stolen. In fact leave a gun in the car and you just made made a gift of one to a criminal. “Hey, thanks!” Note also that 1984 was more than 20 years ago and the city’s overall street crime rate is lower now than then. We also seem to have managed a drop in that crime rate with an unusually low number of gun permits to law abiding Pennsylvanians.
I feel “singled out” because the question was about my city specifically. Over 1,400,000 people live here every day without feeling the need to get permission to carry a firearm to go about their daily business. I’m also a strong believer in freedom of speech without believing that it’s a good idea to walk up to everybody you think is fat or stupid or ugly and telling them so. Speech is a tool and a gun is a tool and knowing when to use a tool is as important as having it to begin with; just stepping into a city for routine business is not a reason to need to carry a gun.
If you think just visiting the city for any reason is really that dangerous then maybe instead of introducing another gun into my neighborhood what you need to do is stay out. Seriously. On another recent thread an overweight Doper asked about self-defense moves and one really excellent post linked to a site by an expert who said that there’s a huge difference between having a self-defense mindset and having a “looking for a fight” mindset, and that unfortunately most programs cloak the latter as the former. I’d prefer not to have people visiting who are preparing for a gun battle, or a gun vs. non-guns battle, or anything similar. (One wonders if you’d bring a gun to Disney World, or leave it home and feel unsafe there… all those people…)
Well, I never made that claim, did I? I mentioned the amount of crime experienced in the city. That creates a feeling of unease. Having a gun in the household or on your person helps some people deal with that feeling.
When did they make you a Mod?
First you state that you “certainly recognize the right to own firearms”, then you spend the rest of your posts indicating why one doesn’t need one. That’s EXACTLY what anti-gun rights folks do.
The only person who should decide whether or not a right needs to be excersized is the person who is, or is not, excersizing that right.
And let’s not forget the category of folks with guns that you actually do have to fear, armed criminals.
So then we are arming for gun battles in the street? This is really not something that makes me feel safer…
The number of times that permitted law-abiding citizens going about their daily business who successfully defend themselves against armed criminals in this fashion in this city is so small as to be statistically insignificant.
Um… no. I recognize that people have a general right to own a gun. You could own a rifle to go hunting. Carrying a handgun around Philadelphia doesn’t do that. You have a right to own a firearm to defend the US against external attack. Carrying a handgun around Philadelphia doesn’t do that. You have a right to keep a gun a home if you think that’ll help protect your home. Carrying a handgun around Philadelphia doesn’t do that. If you had some specific threat against you here or worked here habitually in a high risk line of work of some sort here all of the time then maybe it would seem reasonable, but you just visiting the city carrying a handgun around doesn’t do that.
Apparently the daily conditions and social order that the overwhelming majority of people here live with every day without feeling the need to arm themselves make you nervous and fearful of your own safety. That describes precisely the person I would hope wouldn’t be walking around here with a gun.
How interesting that you seem to trust that there isn’t significant threat from the criminal element, yet what you don’t trust are law abiding citizens who went through measures like training, background checks, etc. to exercise a right.
Could you please present data that shows a significant problem with legal CCW anywhere in this country? Permit holders shooting each other over fender benders, shooting each other in barroom arguments, shooting people for cutting in line at the movies. Show me data on how there is a significant number of violent criminals arrested with a CCW permit in their wallet, or an NRA card.
Your fears are prejudicial, without merit, and ridiculous.