False notions about gun laws in PA

I AM NOT A LAWYER - JUST SOMEONE WHO IS PASSIONATE ABOUT THE 2nd AMENDMENT!

1. "It is illegal to carry at a bar/while drinking."

False. PA has no laws on the books concerning carrying + alcohol. Some say that it is not wise to drink and carry, but if you're comfortable doing so, I say go for it. If you're the type of guy (or gal) who gets rowdy and belligerent while drinking, it might be a good idea to leave the gun at home.

2. "It is illegal to carry into a bank."

False. There are no federal or state laws that prohibit a person from carrying a firearm into a bank. However, banks (and other places of business) can prohibit firearms from their facilities. The worst they can do is ask you to leave. If you don't, you could be charged with trespassing. If they have giant a"NO GUN" sign on the front doors, you COULD be guilty of a trespassing the second you walk through the doors (this is currently a gray area legally).

3. "You have to conceal your gun once you get a license to carry firearms (LTCF)."

False. Concealed carry is one of the many "perks" that a LTCF grants you. It also allows you to do many other things such as carry a loaded firearm in a vehicle, carry during a state of emergency, have firearms loaned to you, etc. It is important to note that the only way you can legally transport a firearm WITHOUT a LTCF is if you are going to or from an exempted destination (range, gun shop, etc.) and if the firearm is UNLOADED. With a LTCF, you can go where ever you want and the firearm can be loaded. For long arms such as shotguns and rifles, you do not need a LTCF to transport them, regardless of your destination. But with or without a LTCF, they have to be unloaded.

Many people choose to "open carry," a mode of carry that does not require a LTCF (unless you're in Philadelphia). The reason you need a LTCF to open carry in Philadelphia is due to the Uniform Firearms Act found in the state's constitution. The UFA states that in a city of over 1 million residents (Philadelphia), a person needs to have a license to carry in any manner. It is important to note that Philadelphia (or any other city, township, or municipality) are not allowed to make their own laws regulating the carrying and ownership of firearms.

4. "You need a special license to carry in Philadelphia."

False. A license from ANY county is good through out the commonwealth. Again, because of the preemption offered by the Uniform Firearms Act in the state constitution, Philadelphia CANNOT make their own gun laws (even though they still try).

5. "You have to register your firearms."

False. There is no firearm registration in PA. The UFA states that any attempts at creating a registry are ILLEGAL. There is however a record of sales database that the state police often use as an illegal "registry." Unlike other states, hand guns cannot be sold between two private citizens without the buyer going through a background check. The seller will "transfer" the hand gun to a business or individual with a Federal Firearm License. The buyer will then have to pay a small fee to have the FFL dealer "transfer" the gun to the buyer after a background check. This usually takes 20-30 minutes. It is important to note that transfers between spouses and parents/children do NOT need to go through a FFL.

6. "If your shirt accidentally rides up while you're conceal carrying, you could be charged with brandishing."

False. There is no brandishing law in PA. You can go from concealed to open carry, to anywhere in between. Hell, you could even duct tape it to your forehead.

7. "It is illegal to carry at a college/university."

False. It may be against the student code of conduct, but it is not illegal. Be prepared to face the consequences (expulsion) if you are a student caught carrying on campus. Carrying at a K-12 school is another legally gray area. The UFA states that it is illegal to carry at a K-12 school, but individuals carrying for "any other lawful purpose" are exempt from the law. Isn't self defense considered a lawful purpose? If you're going to carry at a school, make sure you have a lot of money and a lawyer on speed dial.

Crash: How did this win an Oscar?

I really don't hate that many movies, I may dislike some that I view, but not actually hate. Some movies are bad, but in an entertaining funny way such as Riki-Oh and Iron Thunder (two movies I previously reviewed). Other movies that have some sort of political agenda behind them (Jarhead for example), piss me off more than anything. Like Jarhead, Crash was made to inform the audience that "things in this country are worse than you think". Please, all movie directors out there in LA, movies are meant to entertain, not to be confused with a toilet that you can spew your liberal crap into and have it explode on all of our faces. Crash was a horrible movie, simple as that. The story line was shallow and had no emphasis whatsoever on character development. There were dozens of exaggerated characters that were so unbelievable and unlikable, there was no way to actually "get into" the movie. The racism was so over the top it made me cringe everytime two characters of different nationalities interacted. Every single person in the movie was affected by discrimination either by being on the giving or receiving end. Yes, racism is a problem, but people do not blatantly go up to one another and say "YOU'RE MEXICAN, I DON'T WANT YOU INSTALLING MY ALARM SYSTEM BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING TO STEAL STUFF FROM MY HOUSE". Why wouldn't you want a Mexican to work in your house? They do just as good as a job and you only pay half of the price. "YOU'RE ARABIC, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FLY SOME PLANES IN SOME BUILDINGS AND KILL 2,000 MORE PEOPLE". Seriously, how often does an unprovoked attack happen like that in real life? If it does, it happens very rarely and is not a wide spread problem how the movie portrays it to be. So now this movie is out and everyone is saying "Racism is such a huge problem, I had no idea it was this bad! George Bush isn't doing a good job, he hates black people." I WISH I WAS EXAGGERATING BUT I'M NOT! THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE THAT STUPID AND FILL THEIR HEADS WITH JUNK THEY SEE ON TV OR ON THE BIG SCREEN.
So now it's time for the Academy Awards and Crash is nominated for Best Movie of the Year. All the socio-elites who are rich and white think "Oh how horrible! Minorities are treated so unfairly, this movie is just superb, it depicts life how it really is. Excuse me as I go take a bath in one hundred dollar bills".
Are these people retarded? The Academy Award shouldn't go to a movie that tries to jam as many storylines of objectionable people into one hour and forty minutes of film. It’s an insulting script to the audience's intelligence (America has racial issues just in case you didn’t know) but people think of it as a creative masterpiece with earth shattering ideology. Instead it’s obvious and cliched at so many levels only Hollywood would aspire to reach. People think America is bad with racism? Try going to the place where racism was all started... Europe. Check out: Racism In Europe

In the end, Brokeback Mountain should have won. Sure it was about two gay cowboys who loved playing with each other's trouser snakes, but I'd still rather have seen that win over the travesty of film called Crash.

Iron Thunder: The worst movie ever made...ever.

Imagine that there was a chimpanzee that was capable of using a camera. The chimp could turn it on, start filming, and stop filming at his pleasure. A movie director decides to give the chimp his camera equipment for two whole months to see what the chimp can come up with after the set duration of time. Okay, now imagine that 2 months have passed. The director retrieves the camera back from the chimp but when he opens the camera to take out the film, he finds that the film is covered in feces. Somehow the director thinks this is a ground breaking phenomenon and sells this movie as if it were viewable.

The above paragraph is just a nonsense, hypothetical situation. But all jokes aside, that is what Iron Thunder is, a pile of crap some how converted into DVD form.

This blog entry is more of a warning than a movie review, I do not want anyone else to make the same mistake my friend and I made on that faithful day oh so many years ago. It started off as a regular rainy, boring Sunday. My friend and I were bored out of our minds so we decided to take a drive to Hollywood Video to rent a movie. As we were looking through isles and isles of movies, there was one that caught my eye:



"Whoa, this looks pretty sweet... look at the apache helicopters and awesome tanks on the front cover!" My friend ran over and we both decided we should check this movie out. I think the movie producers should be sued because the movie did not have tanks in it, unless you consider a cardboard box on wheels with a turret mounted on it a tank. There were no apache helicopters either, unless of course you consider stock footage of a NEWS HELICOPTER a goddamn apache helicopter.

Exhibit A: Actual "tank" from the movie:



After seeing that travesty of a supposed high tech military vehicle, we almost turned off the film 20 minutes into it. The story line is so atrocious and blotched up it isn't even worth explaining... but I will try anyways. A scientist developed a computer chip that can be implanted into the brain so this tank called the "Iron Thunder" could be controlled by thought. A military colonel named Nelson is the test subject but something goes wrong and his brain is fried. The test run goes awfully wrong when the Colonel starts to believe he is in battle and has the tank going straight toward Las Vegas. This concept could have been pretty cool if it wasn't for the low budget set, poor character design, horrible acting, lame special effects, and pointless dialogue that can make even a deaf person cringe.

After the movie was viewed, we took it outside and doused it in kerosene. From there you can imagine what happened but let's just say it was worth paying the fine back to Hollywood Video. For more information on this movie, check out: Bad Movie Planet for a hilarious breakdown of the movie piece by piece.

Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Yes, this movie is not a live action film with real actors and sets. It is not a children's cartoon either. It is Japanese animation (anime) and is just one of the many animes that is entering the households of people of all ages across the country. Cowboy Bebop is a 26 episode series that was released one episode per week over in Japan in 1998. The series turned out to be a huge hit in Japan and was eventually licensed and shown on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" with a professional English dub. Three years after the series finale, Shinichirô Watanabe (director of Bebop) produced a full length feature film that was shown across Japan and in selected US theaters in 2001. The movie can still be enjoyed by people who have not seen the series, but the characters and their interactions are a lot more meaningful if you knew them beforehand. The movie takes place between episodes 23 and 24 of the original series. The reason I love the movie so much is because it is just like watching one huge episode of Bebop, which is pretty orgasmic might I add. The world of Cowboy Bebop takes place in the distant future, where planetary travel is possible and space ships are used as cars. A crew of misfits from all different backgrounds ended up crossing paths and became a team of bounty hunters. The story starts to unravel when a tanker truck is blown to high heavens in the middle of a freeway, releasing a mysterious biological weapon into the air of the city. The Bebop crew - Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine, and Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, get right on the job when it is announced on television that the award for the culprit is 300,000 buck-o-roos. The case gets twisted and confusing though when Vincent Volaju, who supposedly has been dead for ten years, seems to be the prime suspect of the tanker explosion. Eventually Spike begins to uncover a government conspiracy and must evade a sexy government agent named Electra, as he looks for the truth behind everything. He even learns some things about himself in the process.

If you have never seen anime before and you want to experiment, I recommend checking out this flick. This is the movie that got me into anime so many years back, it is a good gateway drug.

The Big Lebowski

After Fargo, movie goers had high expectations for Joel and Ethan Coen's next film. In 1998, The Big Lebowski hits theaters across the nation. It did "okay" in the box office, but after it went on home video, it became an instant cult classic. The movie is a comedy but it's not "in your face funny" like Wedding Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin. Instead of using potty words, one liner puns, and obviously ridiculous jokes, the Coen brothers use a more subtle, situational based type of comedy. The main character of the movie, Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), is a pacifist, pot smoking, jobless, lazy bum who sits around all day and bowls. He goes by the name "The Dude", and still calls people 'man'. He has two other buds, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Theodore Donald 'Donny' Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi). Walter is an over aggressive Vietnam War veteran who is constantly making invalid connections between present life matters and Vietnam. Donny is a pretty awkward guy who never knows what's going on; the only thing he really cares about is bowling. The conversations and debacles these three guys get in through out the movie are classic. The story starts out with a bunch of thugs breaking into The Dude's house, mistakenly thinking he is another Lebowski who is a millionaire. To their disappointment, they realize they have the wrong guy so in frustration, one of the men urinate on The Dude's rug. The Dude, Walter, and Donny agree that the millionaire Lebowski owes The Dude a new rug. From there, things turn for the worse, and the Dude finds himself as the money carrier in a kidnapping case in which the victim is the millionaire Lebowski's foxy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid). The Dude is assisted by Walter who of course, manages to screw everything up. The measures and trials the Dude must endure in order to find out the real criminal behind the kidnapping make some of the funniest scenes I've ever seen in a movie. If you want a smart, clever comedy, and you're sick of the generic comedies today, check out the Big Lebowski.

The Fugitive

This is not a new movie by any means (circa 1993) but it is a classic example of what an action movie should be like. The action is dispersed evenly through out the movie, it is the underlying pulse of the movie. There aren't any portions of the movie that drag, the dialouge is short and to the point, and the acting is far beyond superb. With the duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford playing the lead parts, this movie has to be good. The concept of the film is basic, yet the constant action, chases, and tension between Harrison Ford and the police keeps you on the edge of your seat through out the entire span of the film. The story is about a doctor named Richard Kimble who is accused of murdering his wife. The truth is that he came home one night and fought a one armed man who was in his wife's bedroom. The culprit managed to escape and Kimble tried to revive his wife, but it was too late. Incriminating evidence piled up against him in court including a 911 call from his wife which inadvertently identified Kimble as the killer. While being transferred to another prison, the bus went out of control and tumbled down a small hill. Luckily, Kimble escaped and is in hot pursuit by Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones). Trying to remain undetected by the police and uncovering clues about his wife's murder, the movie makes an interesting cat-and-mouse game between him and the police that never allows your attention to slip away.
Some people say that Tommy Lee Jones stole the spotlight from Ford with his role as a sarcastic, over-confident (bordering on arrogance) bloodhound of a US Marshal. Even though Jones won an Oscar for Best Supporting Role, Harrison Ford's part can not be looked down upon as inferior. Sure Ford wasn't an Indiana Jones, that's not what the character was supposed to be like. Kimble (Ford) was an ordinary man running for his life. He was run down to the core; his only tool was his background as a surgeon, which he used to escape the law and find his wife's killer at the same time. That's pretty darn impressive if you ask me.
In retrospect, I recommend this movie for anyone who hasn't seen it and is a fan of action movies. This masterpiece is definitely the action movie of the 20th century

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky

Coming out of Hong Kong in 1992, "Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky" has to be the most absurd and violent movie I have ever seen. With a budget lower than dirt, the movie is more hilarious than anything else. A horrible English dub turns every line into absolute comic gold, completely off sync with the mouth every time. The blood and gore is so over the top, it is un-intentionally humorous. Riki-Oh was sent to prison for man slaughter after killing a bunch of thugs who killed his girlfriend. The inner-workings of the prison are corrupt to the core, and Riki-Oh immediately becomes infuriated by what he sees. With a Warden on a power trip, a deadly "Gang of Four" who control the North, East, West, and South wings of the jail, and an illegal drug ring happening right inside the prison walls, Riki-Oh has a lot of ass kicking to do. He punches his way (literally) through anyone who gets in his way, leaving holes in their stomachs or turning their heads into a mist of bloody pulp. The killing is so over the top, one can only laugh at the obviously fake and plastic body parts being torn off as if they were from a doll. Riki's super human strength was apparently acquired by his late Uncle in one night. He can also perform "miracles" such as tying his own veins together in his arm to stop bleeding and also survive underground for one week with a only a straw for air (he does eat the heart of a dog but I'm not even going to begin explaining how that happened). The warden of the jail also has some super human strength (twist of the year, including last year!), and Riki-Oh must defeat him in an intense final battle at the end of the movie. All in all, I recommend this movie anyone to has a strong stomach and a good sense of humor. It definitely has a spot in my DVD collection.