The Gold Standard | Put the safety on

In the wake of the mass shooting earlier this month in which the college-aged Jared Loughner allegedly opened fire in Tucson, Ariz., many were quick to blame the divisive media culture for his actions.

But it’s not the media culture that should concern us — it’s the gun culture that puts us all at risk.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, the window opened, if only slightly, for Congress to fix this problem.

Well, it acted, but in the kind of way that only Washington politicos could. It passed the National Instant Criminal Background Check System Improvement Amendments Act. The NICS Improvements Act provides financial incentives to states to provide more mental health records and other documents that would prohibit individuals from possessing firearms.

Pennsylvania has been uniquely slow in reporting these “adjudicated” mental cases — those whose conditions have been decided conclusively — to the national background check database.

Perhaps that’s a tad gracious to Pennsylvania. The fact of the matter is that the Keystone State has reported zero — yes, zero — adjudicated mental cases to this federal database since 2008. (The only other state to submit none is Nebraska.)

Either Pennsylvania is astoundingly successful at maintaining the sanity of each and every one of its citizens or — as is more likely — the state government has been painfully slow to make sure that those who have been deemed legally mentally ill are incapable of purchasing firearms.

An urban campus such as ours should willfully be concerned about the lax attitude toward guns taken by Harrisburg. In 2008, 280 out of the 333 homicide victims in Philadelphia were shot to death.

Closer to home, violent crimes on campus rose in 2010 over 2009. The number of homicides rose. The number of aggravated assaults rose. The number of forcible sex offenses rose. And on and on down the list we go.

There are strong and sound arguments to be made in favor of upholding the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In fact, I support the Second Amendment.

What I also support, however, is the principal of federalism — in this case, a local government’s right to govern itself and to enact sensible regulations that pertain to the surrounding community, within the overall framework of a nation at large. There’s no denying that gun laws in Philadelphia must be different in theory and application than those in upstate Erie County.

This notion was ignored when the City Council passed an assault weapons ban in 2008 and a state appeals court ruled that statute illegal. Philadelphia officials had long been trying to pass their own gun laws and prohibit the transfer of guns from one person to another, but the legislation was challenged by the National Rifle Association.

Take a snapshot of the national climate right now and there appears more of a bipartisan consensus surrounding intelligent gun regulations than one might normally think.

Peggy Noonan, a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the former speechwriter of Ronald Reagan, wrote last week that President Barack Obama himself should take up the mantle of common-sense gun regulations such as a ban on extended ammo clips.

Last week, even former Vice President Dick Cheney conceded as much, saying it is perhaps “appropriate to re-establish” certain federal limits on ammunition clips and automatic weaponry.

But that’s thinking too big already. Let’s start simple. Forget the president and Congress.

Let’s call upon the legislators in Harrisburg, Governor Tom Corbett (R-Pa.), the City Council and Mayor Michael Nutter to forge a way forward that protects gun ownership rights while allowing Philadelphia to enact logical ordinances. We need to shield a city and protect a college campus from the tragedies that guns can cause.

Brian Goldman is a College junior from Queens, N.Y. His e-mail address is goldman@theDP.com. The Gold Standard appears every Monday.

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