While his competitors are zeroing in on Senator Toomey and the general election, Braddock Mayor John Fetterman wants to talk about issues, specifically gun control.
Today, the Fetterman campaign debuted an ad entitled “Guns”.
“All of us should agree that we want to make sure that weapons like this stay out of the hands of people that could use them to hurt people,” the Mayor states while holding his Smith & Wesson Model 500, which he has owned for 10 years.
“Politicians in Washington are too afraid of the gun lobby to pass even the most sensible reforms, like universal background checks,” the candidate says in a statement accompanying the commercial. “I’m not going to promise you that I alone can change Congress, but if we want to reduce gun violence, first we have to stop electing cowards. And honestly, do I look like I’m scared of the NRA?”
Fetterman is running against former Chief of Staff to Gov. Wolf Katie McGinty and former Congressman Joe Sestak in the Senate Democratic primary.
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23 Responses
I could, I would, I should, but won’t support John Fetterman, because he advocates even a modicum of: “GUN CONTROL.” When politicians of any party, any position, or any place; Promote: Anti-Gun Legislation, Prohibitive Rules, Contorted Regulations, or Interdiction of the: “Second Amendment”…they are immediately placed at the top of my ‘Shit-List.’
sorry philadelphian, is this better?
and cpa dem, i get that this is politics and i see your point about the full body cover, but im still really alarmed by the decision making here. he called 911, the right thing to do, but then he hops in his truck with his shotgun to chase down the suspect? fetterman often acknowledges how people sometimes cross the street to avoid him. i could totally see that situation ending pretty badly because he wanted to take the law into his own hands. vigilantism is great in superhero movies but it’s scary when real people are running around with the intention of using a firearm on a fellow man.
@philadelphian: Get your own nickname. Please.
@philadelphian, Fetterman recently addressed that smear campaign that was being shopped by the McGinty campaign to the media and donors:
Race wasn’t a factor because the “jogger” had every square inch of his body covered.
http://www.phillyvoice.com/fetterman-responds-tip-about-time-he-pulled-gun-unarmed-jogger/
Those are the actions of someone willing to risk his own life for the safety of the public. That’s the guy I want representing me.
woah i dont know how i had not seen that shut gun story before. i googled it and it was an african american guy too. i mean, i guess i need more info but from everything im seeing, it really does not look good for the big fella, in a year when black lives matter more than ever, to have pulled a gun on the first one you see after hearing gun shots
link with video for those interested: http://www.wtae.com/news/local/allegheny/Braddock-mayor-detains-jogger-after-hearing-possible-gunshots/18358860
Universal rule of posts on this site and any other: the length is in inverse proportion to the quality.
Billy it’s not a smear campaign, it actually happened, and he thinks it was justified: http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/3406649-74/fetterman-police-braddock
We don’t need leaders who set this kind of example for the people in their communities. How can anyone reasonably expect those who live in Braddock to see something like that and not feel like it’s an acceptable way for them to react? It only takes one more step for that kind of misunderstanding to turn into a tragedy. Fetterman should have called the police instead of grabbing his gun.
Fetterman likes to play tough guy. I had a friend that acted just like him back in the 1980’s. He bullied people with his substantial size and bad attitude. Then one night he stepped outside a bar on the edge of the everglades and got his head caved in. His assailant was a 140 pound ex-con.
eagleswing… Do you really not realize how childish you appear with your “nuclear warheads” line of “reasoning”. That puts you right on the edge, the far edge, of mindless babble for “Gun Control”. UBCs are not about stopping crime or random violence, they are intended to create criminals that can be classed as “Prohibited Persons”. The Politicians and Pundits promoting them know that they have no effect on violent criminals or lunatics and that they don’t prevent a normal person from deciding that they “just can’t take it any more”. They don’t care, your “safety” is their least concern, their own safety and power is the only thing important to them.
That’s a complete distortion Mmmm. It’s been already covered in the press how McGinty’s campaign has been shopping this untrue smear behind the scenes.
I applaud Fetterman’s courage in that incident. McGinty and Sestak live in neighborhoods with million dollar homes and would never have to deal with issues like that. That incident was right after Sandy Hook and is one of the reasons I’m supporting Fetterman. That’s the real deal right there.
I completely agree that we should “make sure that weapons like this stay out of the hands of people that could use them to hurt people.” Let’s start with getting them out of the hands of John Fetterman, who believes it is his duty as a Mayor to enforce vigilante justice in Braddock by pulling a shotgun on whoever happens to be nearby when he hears gunshots. Who needs police when you have Mayor John.
Re: “we want to make sure that weapons like this stay out of the hands of people that could use them to hurt people”
And the way this is being done is to try to pass laws to monitor and control loans, transfers or physical access of firearms, ammunition, or “high capacity” magazines to distant relatives, friends, domestic partners, roommates or other acquaintances you have known for years. You can see this philosophy reflected in the laws passed in CO and WA and proposed in OR and ME. Another example is the background check legislation (SB649) that failed to pass the US Senate in 2013. The title of the bill was word doctored to be innocuous but the devil is in the details and what was being proposed as part of the background check process was a litany of vague, abstruse and onerous restrictions on friends and family members. In addition, the hastily written Toomey amendment was worded in such a way that existing gun laws that currently protect gun owners (like a prohibiting a registry) could be circumvented by the President simply having the BATF report to DHS instead of the Attorney General. The overall net effect of these proposals is make it onerous and legally risky to own firearms and to have law abiding gun owners be subject to intimidation and entrapment by overzealous and unscrupulous authorities who are aligned with an anti-gun agenda.
Marxists and Islamists who infect our federal government plus the MSM media prostitutes who protect them will gleefully lie, falsify, fabricate, slander, libel, deceive, delude, bribe, and treasonably betray the free citizens of the United States..
Second Amendment foes lying about gun control – The 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. Firearms are our constitutionally mandated safeguard against tyranny by a powerful federal government.
Only dictators, tyrants, despots, totalitarians, and those who want to control and ultimately to enslave you support gun control.
No matter what any president, senator, congressman, or hard-left mainstream media prostitutes tell you concerning the statist utopian fantasy of safety and security through further gun control: They are lying. If their lips are moving, they are lying about gun control. These despots truly hate America..
These tyrants hate freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and private property. But the reality is that our citizens’ ownership of firearms serves as a concrete deterrent against despotism. They are demanding to hold the absolute power of life and death over you and your family. Ask the six million Jewws, and the other five million murdered martyrs who perished in the Nazzi death camps, how being disarmed by a powerful tyranny ended any chances of fighting back. Ask the murdered martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto about gun control.
Their single agenda is to control you after you are disarmed. When the people who want to control you hold the absolute power of life and death over your family, you have been enslaved. The hard-left Marxist and Islamists who infect our federal government plus the MSM media prostitutes who protect them will gleefully lie, falsify, fabricate, slander, libel, deceive, delude, bribe, and treasonably betray the free citizens of the United States into becoming an unarmed population. Unarmed populations have been treated as slaves and chattel since the dawn of history.
Will we stand our ground, maintaining our constitutionally guaranteed Second Amendment rights, fighting those who would enslave us?
American Thinker
More brainwashed anti gun skave Gish galloping rhetoric irrelevent in the real world
Re: “sensible reforms”
In 1934, 1938, 1968, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1994 I suspect similar arguments were made for “sensible reforms” when more restrictive federal gun laws were passed. Since all of the regulations derived from these laws are apparently not enough, maybe you can understand the reluctance of gun owners to entertain the idea of quietly accepting the any more. The problem is the real agenda of the people leading the charge for more gun control is to ban all guns except for the government and governments (unlike individuals) have the track record for killing people that don’t agree with them. This is really just about using relatively infrequent, isolated incidents of gun crimes to whip lawmakers into an emotional frenzy to goad them into quickly advancing the agenda of gun control irrespective of any facts in more incremental “progressive” steps in order to set a new baseline and move the goal posts to the point where an unscrupulous government would have the option to do what ever they please.
Re: “universal background checks,”
Currently, there are only 2 ways to legally sell a gun in the US to a private citizen. One is a private sale between individuals (typically like between family and friends) or by a gun dealer licensed with a Federal Firearms License (FFL) from the federal BATF. Only individuals with an FFL can run a background check through the government NICS database of prohibited persons. Private citizens cannot. Note that a person can purchase a firearm online, but the physical transfer of the firearm still must go through an FFL at the seller or an FFL local to the buyer. So anyone wanting to improve the process should encourage the federal government to do 2 things:
1) Allow any small gun dealer to get an FFL without having a storefront. Currently, thanks to the Clinton administration’s effort to reduce the supply of guns, you can’t get an FFL if you want to sell guns only at gun shows (Google BATFE form 5310 FFL application and look at question 18a). As a result someone that wants to sell guns but can’t afford the inventory costs, zoning challenges and overhead of a storefront has to sell illegally or discretely at the edge of the law as a “private individual” and hence can’t run a background check. Rather than throwing these “kitchen table” sellers out of the system like Clinton did hoping they would go away, they should allow them to get an FFL and subject them to BATF rules, audits and oversight like they were before the Clinton administration let political anti-gun ideology get in the way.
2) Give anyone free, public, anonymous online access to the NICS database. I don’t understand why a federal database of people prohibited from owning firearms can’t be available in the public domain like federal databases for sex offenders. Unlike the sex offender database, the NICS system is really a go/no go process and no useful information has to be displayed to facilitate phishing expeditions for identity theft other than what was already known by the user making the query. It’s certainly no more revealing than the FAA’s pilot and mechanic license query system, which provides more detailed information on presumably law-abiding citizens. Once this system is implemented, you then tell private sellers if you sell or give a firearm to someone and don’t retain documented proof that says you did a favorable NICS check on the buyer, you could be held liable if they commit a gun-related crime. This would effectively close the so-called private sale loophole and still preserve the anonymity of the parties involved the same way the current background check system does now. If a private sale firearm shows up at a crime scene, the BATF follows their current procedure of using the serial number of the firearm to contact the manufacturer and ultimately the last FFL that sold the firearm to a private citizen to obtain that citizen’s name and address from the ATF form 4473 the FFL is required to keep on file. That citizen is then contacted and produces the piece of paper from the NICS background check that identifies the second private citizen who is then contacted, and so forth.
The real benefit of this proposal is how it can help identify the illusive killer with questionable behavior patterns or mental health issues that is causing so many problems. As it stands now there is no easy, fast, non-bureaucratic method for someone to determine if a suspicious person (client, neighbor, employee, student, etc) is a potential threat to society. If someone thinks an individual could be a threat, a query to a public NICS database would at least tell him or her in a few seconds if the individual could obtain a firearm. Then, armed with that information the appropriate authorities could be notified and they could decide if it was erroneous information or whether to investigate further. As it stands now, if you tell authorities you know a suspicious person they will probably ignore you, but if you tell them you know such a person and by the way according to the NICS database he can buy a firearm, they will probably be more inclined to investigate rather than risk embarrassment later if the worst happens. The same would be true if you see a suspicious acquaintance with a firearm when the NICS query says he’s prohibited from having one. It would also help provide piece of mind and a method for victims of violent crimes to ensure their assailants either on parole or still at large have not been excluded from the database because of some bureaucratic foul-up.
Other specific public safety issues where it would be useful are:
allow potential victims to vet known stalkers or acquaintances under a restraining order
allow gun clubs to vet potential members
allow shooting ranges to vet suspicious customers
help prevent straw purchases by allowing FFL’s to vet all individuals involved with the purchase of a firearm as a gift
allow mental health workers to vet troubled individuals like the Aurora Colorado theater killer
allow resource officers and school officials to vet suspicious students like the Arapahoe High School killer in Colorado
allow the family of the mentally troubled Lafayette, LA killer to verify he couldn’t purchase a firearm
allow police officers to vet anyone they contact – (note the routine background checks performed by police often do not include information about firearms because they don’t directly access the NICS database)
Until Fetterman can pick up a gun group endorsement, his commercial means NOTHING to gun owners. And he would have gotten the questionnaire by now to answer and return. I don’t see where any gun group is endorsing him. So, meh.
‘universal background checks?’ that does not seem like much of a solution. a psychiatrically disturbed boy like the Newtown school child murderer had a mother who thought her wreck of a son needed some firearms and gun training. both she and her son could easily pass a ‘universal background check.’ how about a law that bans sale of assault rifles to anyone except law enforcement ? the right to bear arms does not include the right to own nuclear warheads…
African Americans suffer most of all for gun violence. I suggest we pass a law that applies to African Americans only. That way, they’ll benefit from the laws they believe they need, and maybe there will be less opposition from white people.
We don’t have to worry about accusations of racial discrimination. It’s perfectly reasonable to pass laws that specifically _benefit_ a disadvantaged community (in this case, it is the demand for race-blind laws that is racist).
Following up on what my more-inclusive cousin PA Dem says, is there any ad buy for this at all? Or is this one of those web-only ads that nobody will actually see unless it somehow goes viral on Facebook & Twitter?
Why didn’t he use the statement here as his script instead, far stronger. Oh well, nobody will ever see this anyways, he has enough money for about one day of tv ads…
Sure, John, let’s focus on the one issue Toomey is actually good on.
All that the ad is missing is for John to crush the gun in his fist !