Just months before an assassin tried to kill Donald Trump, Pennsylvania Republicans blocked an attempt to ban the type of assault rifle used in the attack. It’s lunacy that these guns are on the streets — and that you can buy them at only 18.
Former president Donald Trump takes cover after an assassination attempt during his rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
BY HELEN SANTORO
07.19.2024
JACOBIN
In the months before Saturday’s assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the state’s legislature blocked a bill banning the sale of the type of assault rifle allegedly used in the attack.
Prior to that, at the federal level, nearly all of Pennsylvania’s Republican congressional delegation voted against a bill to reinstate a nationwide assault weapons ban, and the US Senate GOP blocked the legislation.
In January, a Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania House committee passed a bill banning the sale of assault weapons — against the unanimous opposition of Republicans on the panel. That legislation, however, was then tabled in the Pennsylvania assembly, facing stiff opposition from the state’s Republican lawmakers and the National Rifle Association (NRA).
On Saturday, Trump was wounded in the ear in a shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The suspected shooter, killed by Secret Service snipers, was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, twenty, from nearby Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and an AR-15-type semiautomatic assault rifle was recovered at the scene. The gun was reportedly purchased by and registered to the shooter’s father.
When Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania opposed the assault weapons ban legislation earlier this year, they cited constitutional concerns as one of their reasons.
Yet even as the GOP made that legal argument, the Trump-packed US Supreme Court — the final arbiter on constitutional interpretation — was simultaneously allowing a similar ban to continue in a neighboring state.
“If we had banned assault weapons, this might have ended differently,” said a Pennsylvania lawmaker who asked for anonymity, citing safety concerns. “Whether or not you support Donald Trump is irrelevant in this conversation.”
Pennsylvania’s Battle Over Guns
In Pennsylvania, the minimum age for purchasing a rifle like the AR-15 that was apparently used in the attempted assassination of Trump is eighteen years old. The age requirement for purchasing a handgun is twenty-one.
After Democrats won control of Pennsylvania’s state assembly in 2023, they advanced an ambitious package of gun control legislation, including the proposed ban on future sales of assault weapons like the gun reportedly used in the assassination attempt. This legislation mirrored the 1994 federal assault weapons ban and would have prohibited semiautomatic and automatic guns with specific features like military-style grips and those capable of accepting large-capacity magazines. This legislation expired a decade later in 2004.
When the bill passed the House committee, the National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted it, declaring that “this bill would represent the most widespread gun ban in state history and almost certainly trigger its own legal challenge.”
Weeks later, the bill was tabled.
“Inside the capital there is zero political will to do anything on guns,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.
A 2016 study from University of Massachusetts researcher Louis Klarevas found that gun massacres fell 37 percent when the 1994 federal assault weapons ban was active and rose 183 percent after it expired in 2004.
“A Political Talking Point”
The AR-15 is a common weapon of choice for mass shooters in the United States: the 2016 anti-LGBT Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, and the mass shooting at the 2017 Sutherland Springs church massacre all involved this semiautomatic rifle.
Yet along with blocking the assembly bill that would ban assault weapons, the Pennsylvania legislature shot down two other gun safety bills by a razor-thin margin that would have banned future sales of accelerated trigger activators, which increase the rate of fire, and streamlined the process of filing records of gun sales with the Pennsylvania State Police.
“There are all of these people on all sides of the aisle that say they care about this stuff that’s gun related, and nobody does anything,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker who requested anonymity. “It’s become a political talking point that’s leveraged to gain momentum and then nothing happens.”
Outside of Pennsylvania, other states have successfully passed bans on assault weapons like automatic rifles. However, they have faced legal challenges while trying to maintain such laws. In Maryland, for example, a 2013 law limiting possession of weapons like machine guns enacted after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut survived a legal threat after the US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the law from gun rights activists.
Trump’s Shift on Assault Weapons
Before his first presidential run, Trump wrote: “I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.”
However, as president, he and his party did not push to reinstate the nationwide ban on civilian use of certain semiautomatic weapons. Additionally, when an assault weapons ban passed the Democratic-controlled US House in 2022, eight of Pennsylvania’s Republican representatives voted against it, and the Senate GOP refused to allow it to come to a vote.
Earlier this year, Trump assured the NRA that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he is elected president in 2024.
In 2018, Trump urged lawmakers to pass gun control reforms, including raising the age to buy rifles to twenty-one, referencing the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
“People aren’t bringing it up because they’re afraid to bring it up,” Trump told lawmakers “You can’t buy a handgun at eighteen, nineteen, or twenty. You have to wait until you’re twenty-one. You could buy the weapon used in this horrible shooting at eighteen.”
According to the New York Times, the statements “prompted a frantic series of calls from [National Rifle Association] lobbyists to their allies on Capitol Hill.”
The following month Trump changed his tune.
“On 18 to 21 Age Limits, watching court cases and rulings before acting. States are making this decision. Things are moving rapidly on this, but not much political support (to put it mildly),” Trump wrote on Twitter, now X, that March.
That same year, the National Rifle Association directly appealed to Trump to not raise the firearm age limit. Two years prior, in 2016, when Trump was elected, the NRA’s spending surged by more than $100 million, according to an audit filed with the state of North Carolina. This brought the association’s spending to more than $419 million, compared to $261 million in the 2012 election and $204 million in 2008.
Gun Politics in the Courts
In 2022, Trump-appointed judges struck down restrictions to limit firearm sales to young adults.
“America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army,” wrote Trump-appointed judge Ryan Nelson, alongside another Trump appointee, Judge Kenneth Lee, in a decision by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals. “Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.”
Furthermore, Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees have continued to shift the high court to the right on firearm issues after he left office. In 2022, the Court vastly expanded gun rights after a series of mass shootings that year, including ruling that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, invalidating many states’ tighter gun restrictions.
Just last month, the Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era ban on rapid-fire bump stocks, allowing semiautomatic guns to fire even more rapidly, even as they upheld a Maryland law banning assault weapons like AR-15s.
Last year, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that a law banning dealers from selling handguns to adults under twenty-one violates the Second Amendment.
And in Pennsylvania, where Saturday’s assassination attempt took place, a circuit court earlier this year lowered the age to carry a firearm in public in certain circumstances from twenty-one to eighteen, relying on the Supreme Court’s previous 2022 decision on this issue. The ruling relaxed open-carry laws around the country.
Consequently, any future effort to raise the minimum age for firearm purchase — even by Trump — could run up against significant legal barriers.
These legal decisions are happening amid an increased risk of violence during the 2024 election, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security. The report noted Americans “motivated by conspiracy theories and anti-government or partisan grievances” could try to disrupt the election, which may include violence or threats aimed at voters, election workers, and government officials.
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.
CONTRIBUTOR
Helen Santoro is a journalist based in Colorado.
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