“prohibited item” was the subject line of an email I received recently.

The body of the message contained just one line, “do you know that body armor is not legal to own in pa.unless you are a police officer?”

In fact, I didn’t know that. I was about to reply to that effect, but I realized that there must be more to it. My best guess was that they had seen some sort of body armor on the Pennswoods.net Classifieds, and wanted me to be alerted to what they believed to be a contraband item.

Well I’ve already confessed that at the time I received the email, I didn’t really know a lot about the legality of body armor in Pennsylvania. I thought it likely that it was legal to possess, and I’d looked at buying some myself in the past. Frankly the price is a bit much for what would be a novelty item for me. Sitting at a desk typing code doesn’t really and doing some marketing hardly offers a need for body armor, thanks be to God!

I did a couple of online searches before answering. What I found was interesting, and I’ve provided my response in entirety here, in case it proves interesting to others. I’m not a lawyer. What follows is not a meaningful opinion on the legality of body armor. And if you think my printing a link indicates that I endorse a product that is sold on one of those web pages, you might want to invest in an AFDB as well.

Apparently there are some laws against felons owning it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_vest#United_States
http://www.bulletproofme.com/Quick_Answers.shtml#13
http://forums.officer.com/t108432/

Being a purely defensive item, it seems unlikely to be banned anytime soon.

I saw a few references to some states considering the use of body
armor during a crime to be a separate crime. Sort of like how most
states consider the use of lock picks to commit burglary (or any other
crime) to be a crime separate from the burglary, but otherwise
lockpicks are an unregulated locksmith tool. Of course bolt cutters
are usually faster and cheaper, so I suppose regulating lockpicks
wouldn’t be worth it.

Anyway, no, I’m not aware of any ban on body armor ownership in PA.
Several companies will gladly ship into PA, including Amazon.

I’ve thought about buying some myself, but it tends to run into
several hundred dollars for the lighter stuff, and it’d be one more
thing sitting around cluttering my basement.

I’m assuming you were concerned over someone selling body armor on the
site. If you were asking if it is legal for you to buy it from some
one else, probably, as far as I know, unless you’ve got a felony
record and PA has changed its laws recently. Be on the look out for
bullet holes, knife slashes, and wear. I expect body armor to be like
bicycle helmets. If it takes a hit once, trash it and buy new.

If you have body armor and are asking if you can sell it, again
probably, as far as I know. You are responsible for making sure you
obey the law. I don’t have any issue with it on the site.

Ads are archived after expiration in case law enforcement requests it.
Caveat emptor.

Best wishes,
Chris

Running a little late, but I’ve uploaded the pictures Arny took back in May.

I hope everyone had a happy and safe 4th. Safe travels back home!

God bless!
Chris

From around 11:30pm on Friday June 29 until around about 8:15am Saturday the 30th I had misbehaving front end web servers that were resulting in a small percentage of people encountering server errors when trying to use the Pennswoods.net Classifieds.

I’ve repaired this now, and I thank those of you who reported the errors to me.

Best wishes,
Chris

March 27, 2012 pricing of gasoline at the Ebensburg, PA Uni-Mart.

Gas prices are falling in Ebensburg!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me an email about his experience over the Memorial Day weekend. With his permission I’ve copied it here. This is from Arnold Cummings in Brookville, PA.

Over the Memorial Day weekend I went to my camp near Tidioute Pa. . As usual on Saturday I went yard sailing. The last sale I went to on that venture was up Church Hill Road. This road is located off Route 62 between the the Hickory Nut Bar and the small plaza next to it in the town of East Hickory in Forest Co. in North Western Pa.

As I went up the road to the sale there was an old small cemetery on the left side that sits on a knol at the edge of a large field. I noticed that there was a single small American flag at one of the stones. As I left the sale and came back down the road I was compelled to stop at the cemetery and “Thank the Veteran ” ( with the flag I assumed it was a Veteran and figured it maybe from the Civil War ).

I had stopped at this cemetery along time ago but did not remember much about it. As I looked at the few stones there were before the one with the flag many thoughts went through my mind about what it must have
been like in the early 1800’s. When I saw the grave with the Flag it only had the name and date of death. As I looked at the bronze marker I was taken back that this soldier was in the War of 1812 —– I thought my God this soldier fought 200 years ago for the freedoms that we have today —200 years later !!

We have had a lot of hype about the Civil War and its 150th celebrations but hardly anything about the War of 1812. I went to camp and was so wound up about this that I mistakenly told fellow campers about the Soldiers grave I was at from the “Revolutionary War ” I was really wrong it was 1812 !! Later I was compelled to go back and take a couple pictures which I have attached. I felt very dumb founded that I knew nothing about this war.

I have since done research and was amazed at what it was all about and how it has really affected our lives today. Just to mention a few things, the Battle of New Orleans, the burning of Washington DC (The
US Capital in particular ), setting some of our northern borders with Canada and something we hear all the time “The Star Spangled Banner ” .

Take a little time and see how important this war was in our History and Freedom. I have made a promise to myself that I will be back to the grave and put a flower on it to show my thanks —every Memorial Day that I have my health and can go there.

Arny

Placing an ad on the internet involves balancing exposing your contact information with protecting your privacy. I understand that, and I try to avoid making those decisions for you. I do filter out email addresses from ads. I catch too much heat for scammers and spammers lifting those addresses and abusing them.

Phone numbers are a little different. I rarely get grief for an abused phone number, so I let it up to you as to whether to put that out there or not. When I do get grief over a phone number, it is usually because someone typo-ed a phone number and accidentally (rarely deliberately) put someone else’s phone number in their ad. Typically when this happens I have to remove the ads and lock down the account until I get it sorted out as to what happened.

Something else to think about is how people are going to contact you. I see ads that specify “no emails, no calls, text messages only”. That’s fine. That’s your business. However I know more people that don’t have text messaging than those who do. Admittedly I’m a little older. My younger brother goes into text-withdrawal if he is unable to text for 10 minutes. But think about the audience you are advertising to, if you tell people not to call you, it shouldn’t be too surprising if they don’t contact you at all.

Best wishes, and happy buying, selling, and trading!
Chris

Some of you may have noticed that I had two separate outages on Sunday. In the morning one of my front end webservers flaked out, resulting in about 30% of our visitors being unable to view ads. After I resolved this, the authentication server flaked out in the late evening, resulting in most visitors not being able to be signed in, or not being able to see web pages.

My apologies for the inconvenience. Thank you for bearing with me while I repaired these, and thanks to those of you sent me error messages.

Chris

I’ve been meaning to add a category for child care for some time. It is a service that is frequently sought out on the PWC and there seemed to be enough demand for the category to make it worth adding. Both those seeking child care and those providing are welcome to advertise.

Please check out those to whom you would entrust your children. I don’t review ads before they go live, and the presence of an ad in the PWC Child Care section does not imply an endorsement or a vetting process.

Best wishes,
Chris

I’m frequently accused of deleting ads.  Frankly, I have better things to do, and I avoid removing ads in so much as I am able to do so.  I thought it might be interesting for folks to see how ads really do exist the Pennswoods.net Classifieds, so I did a couple of counts.  Here are some numbers for ads posted within the last 14 days.

Ads deleted by the owner. => 6085
Ads deleted for being in the wrong category, or for some other guideline violation. => 969
Ads the expired naturally. => 926
Ads removed because it was a scam. => 71
Ads the I really did remove. => 64

The vast majority of the ads were removed because people sold their item and removed their own listing, or because they removed this listing to post a different ad.

The next biggest cause of an ad to be removed is because it was reported as out of category, or a guide violation. More about how / why this happens can be seen in FAQ #10.

The third largest cause of an ad to be removed is because it expired. Ads run for 14 days, thus guaranteeing that visitors don’t waste their time looking through stuff that has long since been sold.

Ads that I removed include things such as scams and having the wrong phone numbers in the ads.

Best wishes,
Chris