Of all the freedoms dear to Air Force vet Stanley Switzer, he's especially partial to the one that allows him to carry a sidearm. And when county commissioners in Clarion and Jefferson counties told him he couldn't bring a gun into a county courthouse, he and a couple other Western Pennsylvania gun owners fought the law.

And the gun owners won.

"Listen, I'm a Korean War veteran. This is what the hell I was over there for," Switzer, 72, said yesterday. "Whenever you have a bunch of bureaucrats trying to take away your freedom, that's when you take action."

Which explains, in part, how we've arrived at this most recent action:

A judge has ruled that a security ordinance allowing for metal detectors and X-ray machines to be placed in the courthouse doorway to conduct weapons searches, conflicts with state law that says "no county [may] regulate the lawful ownership, possession, transfer or transportation of firearms."

State law, which takes precedence over local ordinances, already regulates firearms in courthouses, saying that gun possession in a "court facility" is illegal. But those court facilities, argued William Strong, the plaintiffs' attorney, include courtrooms, the district attorney's office and judges' chambers, but not the whole building.

That means a person carrying a legally registered handgun should be allowed access to, say, the assessor's office, Strong said. And it also means that counties and towns can't pass firearms-related ordinances meant to supplement the existing state law. Jefferson County's law, in place since 2002, hasn't been enforced lately.

The judge, Robert Wolfe, of Warren County, agreed with Strong's clients, issuing a judgment May 19 saying the Jefferson County ordinance was unconstitutional.

In essence, Wolfe said, random security checks can be carried out at the entrance to a courtroom, but not the building's point of entry.

"This will have statewide impact," Strong predicted. The Common Pleas ruling does not carry jurisdiction over similar ordinances in other counties, but if someone tried to challenge such an ordinance, they'd have the Jefferson County ruling as ammunition.

Strong, representing two Clarion County men and one from Jefferson County, filed a complaint last year against Jefferson County, asking a judge to overturn the county ordinance.

The Clarion men, Switzer and John Minich, filed an identical suit in Clarion County two years ago, trying to repeal that county's courthouse security ordinance.

Clarion County's commissioners eventually backed down, marking the gun owners' first victory, but Jefferson County's commissioners fought Strong's legal challenge.