In the months before Saturday’s assassination attempt on formerpresident Donald Trumpin 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 delegationvoted 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 committeepasseda bill banning the sale of assault weapons — against theunanimousoppositionof Republicans on the panel. That legislation, however, was then tabled in the Pennsylvania assembly, facing stiff opposition from the state’s Republican lawmakers and theNational Rifle Association (NRA).
On Saturday, Trumpwas woundedin 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 tothe shooter’s father.
When Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania opposed the assault weapons ban legislation earlier this year, theycitedconstitutional 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 allowinga 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.”
In Pennsylvania, the minimum age for purchasing a rifle like the AR-15 that was apparently used in the attempted assassination of Trumpis eighteen years old. The age requirement for purchasing a handgun is twenty-one.
After Democrats won control of Pennsylvania’s state assembly in 2023, theyadvancedan ambitious package of gun control legislation, including the proposed ban onfuture sales of assault weaponslike 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 legislationexpired a decade later in 2004.
When the bill passed the House committee, the National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted it,declaringthat “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 Klarevasfoundthat gun massacres fell 37 percent when the 1994 federal assault weapons ban was active and rose 183 percent after it expired in 2004.
The AR-15 is a common weapon of choice for mass shooters in the United States: the 2016anti-LGBT Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 shootingon the Las Vegas Strip, and the mass shooting at the2017 Sutherland Springs church massacreall involved this semiautomatic rifle.
Yet along with blocking the assembly bill that would ban assault weapons, the Pennsylvania legislature shot downtwo other gun safety billsby 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, a2013 lawlimiting possession of weapons like machine guns enacted after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut survived a legal threat after the US Supreme Courtrejecteda challenge to the law from gun rights activists.
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 representativesvoted against it, and the Senate GOP refused to allow it to come to a vote.
Earlier this year,Trump assured the NRAthat “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,” Trumptoldlawmakers “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 theNew 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),” Trumpwrote on Twitter, now X, that March.
That same year, the National Rifle Association directly appealed to Trumpto not raise the firearm age limit. Two years prior, in 2016, when Trump was elected, the NRA’s spendingsurged 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.
In 2022, Trump-appointed judges struck down restrictions tolimit 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 Courtvastly expanded gun rightsafter 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 aTrump-era banon 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 Virginiaruledthat 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 yearlowered the ageto carry a firearm in public in certain circ*mstances from twenty-one to eighteen, relying on the Supreme Court’s previous 2022decisionon 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 bythe 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.
