As elected officials and community leaders condemned the assassination attempt against former President Trump on Saturday, as well as political violence generally, some also bemoaned the shooter’s easy access to the powerful firearm used in the attack.
They noted that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa., used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, similar to weapons that have been used in numerous mass shootings around the country.
Those include a shooting in Philadelphia last year in which an apparently disturbed man is charged with killing five people and injuring several others, and the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in which 11 worshipers were murdered.
Pennsylvania law allows anyone 18 or older to purchase an AR-style rifle or other long gun from a shop after passing a quick background check, or from an individual without a background check. In the case of Saturday’s shooting, the weapon had reportedly been purchased by Crooks’ father.
To prevent or reduce the harm from such incidents, the state should ban or restrict access to so-called assault weapons, said officials who spoke at a press conference Monday on election safety.
For a political candidate “to get shot at and almost killed, that’s an absolute disgrace,” Philadelphia Democratic Party chair and former congressman Bob Brady said. “And … by a long-range automatic rifle that only law enforcement and military should have — maybe we should figure it out, do something about that.”
Speakers at the press conference outside Philadelphia City Hall mourned Corey Comperatore, a rallygoer who died when he used his body to shield his wife and daughter. Two others in the audience were critically injured, while Trump was shot in the ear.
“What is clear to many of us is that a weapon of war should never end up in the hands of a 20-year-old as it did on Saturday. That is an issue that we will also work on together, as a region, to prevent further gun violence,” Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija said.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner recalled that a similar firearm was found in the vehicle of two Virginia men who traveled to Philly in November 2020, allegedly to interfere in the last Biden-Trump contest.
“A couple guys thought it made sense to bring an AR-15 — sound familiar? — an AR-15 to where votes were being counted in the last presidential election,” Krasner said. “They are now felons. They are now convicted. They are now under supervision of the court.”
Split along party lines
While Crooks’ motive and his activities before Saturday’s shooting are still unclear, state legislators and gun safety advocates say a number of laws have been proposed that might have made it harder for him to obtain the weapon, and for shooters in many other incidents across Pennsylvania to commit violent crimes.
“For a variety of reasons, preventing access to assault rifles may have been helpful in preventing either this act or preventing the amount of damage caused in this act,” said Adam Garber, the Philadelphia-based executive director of the gun violence advocacy group Ceasefire PA.
Nine states ban assault weapons: New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington and California.
In January, Pennsylvania’s House Judiciary Committee moved five pieces of firearms-related legislation, including a ban on assault weapons such as AR-15 and AK-47 type weapons. It would cover rifles, shotguns and pistols that can use large-capacity ammunition magazines or are capable of fully automatic, semi-automatic, or burst fire.
The bill was unanimously supported by Democrats and unanimously opposed by Republicans. Opponents said some of the firearms are used in shooting competitions, and that citizens need to be armed to protect themselves from people crossing the U.S. border illegally, among other arguments.
Garber said the legislature has other options short of banning weapons, such as requiring gun owners to get licenses, strengthening background check requirements or instituting a waiting period before a would-be buyer acquires a firearm, which would discourage impulsive suicides or shootings.
The City of Philadelphia has tried passing its own gun measures, but they have been blocked in court due to the state’s firearm preemption law.
Calls for safe storage and “red flag” laws
The Democratic-led House has also advanced several other gun restrictions and safety measures in the past couple years. Most have stalled or been ignored in the Republican-led Senate, according to state Sen. Art Haywood, who represents parts of Philadelphia and Montgomery County and has been co-sponsoring gun safety bills since he took office a decade ago.
“In the state Senate, we have a Republican majority that is not in favor of real restrictions on access to guns,” he said Monday. “I have called their strategy the ‘guns everywhere’ strategy — a good guy with a gun kills a bad guy with a gun. That’s ineffective.”
Republican legislators have described some of the proposed restrictions as unconstitutional or needlessly punitive toward law-abiding gun owners, or said gun violence should be addressed by arresting more criminals and enforcing existing laws more vigorously.
After the House passed measures last year on secure gun storage around children and parental liability for children’s use of guns, the state Senate Judiciary chair, Republican Lisa Baker of Luzerne County, said she had no intention of advancing the bills.
“I said we would invite proposals from anyone that represented something of a consensus on approaches deemed constitutional, enforceable, and practical,” Baker said, according to the Patriot News. “To date, we have not received such a proposal.”
Reports that Crooks used his father’s legally purchased gun to shoot Trump and the other victims point to the possible relevance of proposed safe-storage laws that would require gun owners to lock up their firearms, especially when minors are around, Garber and others said.
Crooks was 20 years old and thus not a minor. But “in general, locking up firearms is responsible, and part of that is because it also requires someone to take a pause as they unsecure the firearm, and that prevents them from taking impulsive actions,” Garber said. “That can be really helpful in preventing all forms of violence, including suicide and shootings.”
He and the legislators also touted the possible benefits of so-called “red flag” laws. Such measures allow extreme risk protection orders, where a judge can order temporary seizure of someone’s weapons when they are deemed to pose a risk to themselves or others.
“I certainly know nothing about the mental state of this person,” said state Sen. Sharif Street, referring to Crooks. “But if a person is having a mental health crisis, and can be identified, and there’s a process for family members and other people having those guns taken away from people, that could prevent a lot of mass shootings, and a lot of shootings period.”
Haywood said the women’s rights marches that followed Trump’s election in 2016 led to a surge of legislative interest in passing bills on taking away weapons from domestic abusers, as well as from people deemed to pose a risk.
In a rare case of bipartisan agreement, a measure on domestic abusers relinquishing weapons became law (although enforcement has been spotty). However, the accompanying red flag proposal “didn’t get to the finish line,” he said.
“There were issues about due process, about how to take away guns from people at risk to themselves or others,” he said. “They didn’t get resolved.”
A laundry list of stalled proposals
Gun measures that have been proposed in Pennsylvania include one that would mandate reporting lost and stolen guns. That would help combat straw purchasing, in which a person sells a gun to a person who is prohibited from owning firearms and then later claims that it was lost or stolen, Street said.
Other proposed laws would close the loophole allowing private gun sales without a background check; ban the sale of so-called “cop killer” armor-piercing bullets; raise the minimum age for ownership of long guns; ban bump stocks and other devices that convert semi-automatics into fully automatic weapons; and ban ghost guns, which are assembled at home and lack serial numbers that make them practically untraceable.
Hayward and Street said they intend to keep sponsoring gun restriction and safety bills, but they were skeptical that any would pass unless Democrats gain control of the state Senate in a future election.
While the shooting in Butler on Saturday targeted the nation’s top Republican and a crowd of his supporters, Street said it was unlikely to motivate state GOP legislators to start supporting tougher gun laws.
“This happened when we weren’t in session, so we haven’t been together and we’ll see what happens when we get back,” he said. “But given the Tree of Life didn’t — there was a massive loss of life there — and given the mass shooting of police officers in my district, at 15th and Erie, didn’t, I’m not confident that this will do it.”
“At some point, it’s going to happen. I’m just not sure we’re there yet,” Street said.
The shooting at the Trump rally broadly underlined the state’s failure to get a handle on the vast harms caused by gun violence, Hayward said.
“It’s terrible for the nation and it’s terrible for Pennsylvania. That the shooter was from Pennsylvania was just devastating,” he said. “To some extent we’re accountable for what happened here. It’s very sad.”
