Republicans in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives this week defeated Democrats’ attempt to pass legislation prohibiting the sale of what they term “assault weapons.”
The bill was introduced last year by then-State Representative Ed Gainey (D-Pittsburgh) who left his seat earlier this year to become mayor of Pittsburgh. It never received a vote of the House Judiciary Committee, so Democrats moved to suspend House floor rules and record a vote of the full chamber. The legislation failed by a vote of 111 to 87.
Only one Democrat, State Rep. Chris Sainato (D-New Castle), voted with the Republicans against passage. Only one Republican, State Rep. Todd Stephens (R-Horsham), voted in favor of the measure. (Two Republicans and three Democrats were absent.)
Gainey’s bill would have banned the sale of what he described as “high-capacity semi-automatic rifles” including the popular AR-15. At the time he introduced it, he said he hoped to prevent mass shootings the likes of which took place in Newtown, Connecticut.; Parkland, Florida; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In asking fellow representatives to back a suspension of the rules, State Rep. Danielle Friel Otten (D-Exton) acknowledged that her motion to bypass the committee process was “extraordinary” but further posited that “we are living in extraordinary times” in light of the mass shooting that occurred earlier this week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“We must suspend the rules and act now because we have the power and the moral obligation to act today before this happens one more time,” Otten told fellow House members. “In shootings like the one yesterday in Uvalde, Texas, they are not just picking up little bodies and and laying them in angelic, satin-lined coffins for peaceful rest; they are scraping up the bodies of children — elementary school children — who need to be identified by their clothing or their dental records or their DNA off of blood-covered floors because their bodies and faces have been rendered unrecognizable by an assault weapon in the hands of an 18-year-old.”
Republicans countered that legislation with such sweeping consequences for Pennsylvanians’ right to bear arms should not circumvent consideration by the judiciary committee.
“No loss of life is not harmful and painful for all of us, regardless of how that happens, and we are tremendously respectful of that,” House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff said. “In this particular motion, I would ask members to vote ‘no,’ at this current moment, to suspend the rules to spontaneously pull up a bill [of a] magnitude of greatness that needs to be vetted through the committee process and all the particulars addressed through that process like every other bill … .”
While Democrats have insisted that states and the federal government should enact bans on semi-automatics, some experts have questioned the success of a federal prohibition that former President Bill Clinton signed in 1994 and that expired 10 years later. An analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center published Wednesday found that the number of attacks with semi-automatics did not fall in the decade the ban was on the books and that attacks did not see a statistically significant increase after the ban lapsed.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
