A day after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Pennsylvania Democrats are calling for more stringent gun control in the state, with State Senator Art Haywood (D-Abington) proposing eligibility licenses for firearm purchases.
Pennsylvania already administers licenses to carry firearms in Pennsylvania, for which any person who is at least 21 years old and has a clean record may apply.
Haywood’s bill would amend Title 18, Pennsylvania’s criminal code, to include an additional mandate that any state resident intending to buy a gun must apply for a permit to make that purchase. The state police, county sheriff or Philadelphia chief of police would issue the application.
To obtain a purchasing license, an applicant would need to be at least 18 years old, reside in the Keystone State, have nothing on his or her record barring a gun purchase and complete a gun safety course. Police, military personnel and corrections officers would be among those exempt from the training course provision.
Before the state grants a purchasing license, applicants would submit to a background check into his or her mental health, juvenile delinquency and criminal records. The prospective buyers would be fingerprinted and checked via federal and state databases. Should the commonwealth deny an eligibility permit, the denied party could petition a court to have his or her application reconsidered.
“My goal is simple: to ensure that our communities are safe places for our children to grow,” Haywood wrote in a memorandum on his legislation. “This legislation is not intended to punish responsible gun owners.”
Haywood added he is confident that his bill would meet constitutional scrutiny, recalling that Maryland has adopted a similar policy that federal courts have declined to nullify.
The senator cited data from the Johns Hopkins Center on Gun Policy and Research purporting to correlate state purchasing license requirements with lower firearm death rates relative to other states. Haywood underscored the example of Missouri, which he stated saw killings with guns jump after repeal of a permit-to-purchase law in 2007. Johns Hopkins posited that the statute’s cancellation led directly to 55 to 63 additional murders per year in Missouri.
When that study came out in 2014, it failed to impress John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Lott observed that while homicides increased in Missouri by 17 percent in the five years after the state rescinded purchase licensing, deliberate killings rose by nearly one-third before the policy got repealed.
“It’s just a very misleading claim” that ending permit-to-purchase drove murders up in the Show-Me State, he told The Pennsylvania Daily Star.
In an analysis of the Johns Hopkins study, Lott mentioned he examined numerous comparable state laws and their effects in the third edition of his famous book More Guns, Less Crime. Therein, he determined those statutes put no discernible downward pressure on homicide rates.
The scholar said policymakers will have more success preventing school shootings if they acknowledge that law-abiding citizens have greater capacity to protect themselves and those around them if they can carry guns. Teachers and staff could not do that in a gun-free zone like Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Tuesday’s Uvalde massacre, in which an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers, is the second mass shooting in America this month, the other having occurred in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. Lott observed that the Buffalo shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, wrote a manifesto in which he asserted that New York State’s strict gun-control laws make mass shootings easier to execute.
He furthermore recalled that the Crime Prevention Research Center discovered in a 2019 study that while 20 states permit school employees to carry guns, school shootings have consistently occurred in institutions disallowing the practice.
“I want people to do something [about these shootings], but I want people to do something that’s actually going to matter,” Lott said. “And what you need to deal with is: What’s the common feature in these things? The attack yesterday was yet another attack that occurred in a place where guns were banned.”
– – –
Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
