I know you get a lot of emails, but I need to make sure you saw my message from last Friday, when the United State Supreme Court overturned the federal bump stock ban.
It's been all over the national news, but those stories have all omitted a very important piece regarding PA: the PA House missed an opportunity to ban bump stocks statewide last month, and now these deadly weapon accessories are legal because of that failure.
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.
