Don't worry, he's still in charge of the rest of our nation's gun laws.

Don't worry, he's still in charge of the rest of our nation's gun laws.

Last October, a Pennsylvania state senator successfully added a potential windfall for the National Rifle Association and other gun groups to a bill intended to protect against certain forms of metal theft. The new metal theft law’s gun provisions permit the NRA and similar groups to sue cities, townships and other localities that provide their citizens with additional protections from guns beyond the protections that already exist in state law.

On Thursday, however, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) announced that she will not defend this metal-theft-turned-gun-protection-act against a lawsuit alleging that the way it was passed violates the state constitution. A provision of the Pennsylvania Constitution provides that, “[n]o bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title, except a general appropriation bill or a bill codifying or compiling the law or a part thereof.” The lawsuit alleges that, because guns have little to do with metal theft, the new law violates this provision of the state constitution.

Our democracy is deeply flawed, primarily by our insistence on electing morons and crooked people The only way you tie a provision allowing the National Rifle Association to sue cities that pass gun laws to "metal theft" is if we're now going to be charging the victims of gun violence with the theft of gun-loving Americans' bullets. But there's good news, of a sort.So hooray, the crooked ploy to allow the NRA to personally enforce their own vision of American gun laws fails because the original state senator, Republican Sen. Richard Alloway, couldn't be bothered to write the law less crookedly.

In the meantime, the action resulted in some Pennsylvania towns repealing new laws that required residents to report lost or stolen guns, apparently because reporting that you've lost your damn gun is a public safety courtesy that the NRA considers too onerous for its law-abiding heroes to bother with. At least those laws were honest attempts to deal with the crime of metal theft.

