Months before a gunman shot Donald Trump at a presidential rally in rural Pennsylvania, state lawmakers proposed outlawing the type of rifle used in the assassination attempt.
The bill has stalled without a vote, which was not surprising: Politically divided Pennsylvania has been deadlocked on gun control for years and lacks sufficient support to tighten or relax existing gun restrictions.
The shooting at a Trump rally, which left one rally attendee dead, two seriously injured and the Republican presidential candidate wounded in the ear, is unlikely to change that.
“Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to get out of having the same gun control laws that aren’t strong enough,” said Democratic state Rep. Ben Sanchez, who has sponsored several gun control bills, including a ban on semi-automatic rifles.
More than half of state legislatures have passed new gun control laws this year, roughly the same number as last year, according to an Associated Press survey, which have led to tougher restrictions in Democratic-led states, including longer waiting periods for gun purchases in Maine and New Mexico and a ban on ammunition sales to people under 21 in Hawaii.
In Republican-led states, the new laws have generally strengthened gun rights — Louisiana and South Carolina now allow adults to carry concealed guns without a license — and many Republican-led states have also passed bills banning the use of special gun store tracking codes for credit card purchases.
But political divisions have often stymied gun control legislation in Pennsylvania. One exception came in October 2018, when then-Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed a bill passed by the Republican-led House and Senate that would have required people convicted of domestic violence or who are the subject of a final restraining order to surrender their guns within 24 hours.
A few weeks later, a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue put Pennsylvania back in the spotlight, and the state legislature responded by creating a five-year, $5 million grant program to fund increased security for houses of worship and other nonprofits that could be targets of hate crimes.
But since then, little bipartisan agreement has been achieved.
In 2021, Governor Wolf vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have allowed people to carry concealed firearms without a permit. The following year, he vetoed another Republican-backed bill that would have allowed lawsuits against local governments that restrict the ownership, possession, transfer or transportation of firearms in violation of local ordinances that violate state bans.
But Wolf wasn’t the only one to block legislation. House Republicans used a procedural step in 2022 to block a Democratic bill that would have banned people under the age of 21 from owning certain semi-automatic rifles. Republicans changed the bill entirely, instead allowing anyone to carry concealed guns. The bill ultimately failed to pass.
In the November 2022 election, Democrats gained a one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and immediately began pushing a variety of gun control measures.
The House passed bills last year to expand background checks on gun sales and allow judges, at the request of law enforcement or family members, to order guns confiscated from people deemed a danger to themselves or others. The House passed a bill this year to ban “ghost guns,” guns without serial numbers. But all three bills have stalled in the Republican-led state Senate.
Three other bills narrowly failed in the House, including a ban on rapid-fire trigger devices, a bill that would have required gun sales to be reported electronically to state police and a bill that would have required gun owners to report lost or stolen weapons within 72 hours.
Sanchez’s bill to outlaw guns that are called “assault weapons” passed a House committee in January but has not progressed further. While the bill has exceptions for guns that are already legally owned, Sanchez said his goal is to ban the AR-15-style rifles that authorities say were used by the 20-year-old man who shot President Trump.
Following the shooting, Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry called on Pennsylvania, other states and lawmakers in Congress to enact an “assault weapons ban.”
“If a former president of the United States, one of the most secure and protected people on the planet, cannot escape the danger posed by the proliferation and accessibility of high-capacity, long-range offensive weapons, then we must respond and reexamine our collective indifference to addressing this problem,” Henry told The Associated Press.
Ten states and the District of Columbia already have laws that generally ban the sale, transfer or manufacture of assault weapons, although the definition varies.
But Adam Gerber, executive director of the gun violence prevention group CeaseFirePA, said passing such a ban would be politically difficult because the AR-15 has become a “symbol of freedom” for ardent gun rights supporters.
Trump spoke about the shootings in his speech at the Republican National Convention but did not mention gun control, but some of his supporters said they remained wary of any move toward further gun control.
“I think our current gun laws are pretty good,” said Michelle Tomsik, a nurse who attended a Trump rally with her 15-year-old daughter and crouched on the ground with others when shots rang out.
Authorities say the gunman used a gun legally purchased by his father and had searched the internet for information about severe depression, though investigators have not confirmed whether he had actually been diagnosed with depression.
Tomsik said he wants to increase state resources dedicated to mental health care, but said the shooting also raises questions about guns.
“Why does he have an AR? Where did it come from? How did he get it and why?,” Tomsik said rhetorically. “But I’m worried that if we start taking everything away like this, they’re going to take away more and more rights.”
Research on the effectiveness of state “assault weapons” bans is largely inconclusive, said Rosanna Smart, co-director of RAND’s American Gun Policy Initiative, which released an analysis earlier this week.
The RAND report noted that there was better research on other gun laws. It cited evidence that safe gun storage laws reduce youth firearm injuries and deaths, that raising the minimum age for gun purchases can reduce youth suicides, and that increases in gun homicides are associated with relaxing concealed carry and self-defense laws.
Smart said high-profile incidents like the assassination attempt on President Trump often spark new debate about gun control and mass shootings.
“It’s very hard to know what kind of gun control measures would be effective in reducing mass shootings,” she said, “but gun control measures give us an opportunity to step back and rethink the state and federal legal landscape around guns.”
