I’m coming to you with some breaking news: Today, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal bump stock ban1 enacted in response to the worst mass shooting in our nation’s history, in Las Vegas in 2017. Now I urgently need you to contact your state legislators and demand a statewide law to ban bump stocks in Pennsylvania and protect our communities.
This disastrous decision makes bump stocks legal in at least 34 states,2 including Pennsylvania, setting our nation on a deadly path. But I need to be clear about one thing: as it pertains to our Commonwealth, this path might have been paved by SCOTUS today, but first it was cleared by the PA House of Representatives.
On May 7, by a margin of just one vote, the Pennsylvania House failed to pass a bill banning bump stocks statewide.3 The lethal irony here is that the main argument made in Harrisburg that day by opponents of the bill was this: a state-level ban that would allow District Attorneys to prosecute individuals for owning bump stocks is unnecessary because there’s already a federal ban in place. Well, not anymore. Today’s ruling takes their failure last month from reckless to deadly.
