Open carry?

When I stopped to get my New York Times this morning in Kresgeville, the door was locked.  Bobbi came over to unlock it and said the State Police had just been there and told her to lock up, since a scruffy looking man was in the area, and he was carrying a gun.  I later found out that the Pleasant Valley School District was under lockdown for the same reason.

Wait a minute.  Isn’t it legal to walk around Pennsylvania with a gun, including a loaded gun?  Don’t we have open carry?  Isn’t this what the NRA and Trump want?.  Especially since Trump got rid of the restriction that prevented mentally ill people from buying guns.

While I am on this subject, former U.S. Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas died earlier this week.  Dickey was the man who in 1996 attached a rider to a House bill to prevent studies of firearm safety.  The law stipulated “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”  Since then the government has spent approximately $240 million to study traffic safety and virtually nothing to study deaths from firearms.  The auto safety studies, it is estimated, have saved about 350,000 lives.  

About the same number of Americans die from guns as from auto accidents.  

In 2012, after the massacre of 12 people in Aurora, Colorado, Mr. Dickey changed his mind.  He was no longer in Congress, however, and his law is still in effect.