State Representative Darisha Parker (D-Philadelphia) this week began asking fellow lawmakers to co-sponsor a bill to raise the minimum firearm purchase and possession age in Pennsylvania from 18 to 21.
The freshman representative cited data from the San Francisco-based Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence indicating that U.S. residents ages 18 to 20 account for 17 percent of confirmed murderers despite being only four percent of the population. She also noted that those ages 14 to 21 have the highest propensity toward suicide or attempted suicide among all Americans.
“Purchasing and possessing a lethal weapon is a serious responsibility that should not be taken lightly,” Parker wrote in a notice of her emerging legislation. “Currently in our country, we set minimum age requirements for driving, voting, and drinking alcohol because we know that young people have not fully developed the parts of their brain responsible for impulse control, judgement, and long-term planning. Further, younger people’s brains and hormonal changes can lead to a lack of self-control and aggressive impulses.”
Parker’s memo said her bill will contain an exception for those who legally acquired weapons before her law goes into effect.
“My goal is not to remove firearms from the hands of legal gun owners, but to reduce rates of firearm violence and self-harm among our young people,” she wrote.
Gun-rights advocates have questioned the ultimate effect of raising the age limit. As John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has noted, depriving young adults of the right to own guns will deny them a means of protection on which many of them, particularly threatened young women, rely.
Lott and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-04) furthermore observed in a recent Newsweek article that increasing the eligibility age for firearm possession or purchase would have had relevance in only eight of the 89 attacks that occurred between 1998 and last month. And some of the perpetrators of those attacks – e.g., the Columbine High School shooters – violated the law to obtain their weapons anyway. Lott and Massie furthermore note that firearm homicides actually increased by six percent after the federal government imposed an 18-year age limit for rifle purchases.
Illinois, the site of America’s most recent mass shooting, sets a minimum age of 21 for both buying and possessing a gun of any kind.
Also this week, Parker proposed an adjustment to the Keystone State’s gun background check system. Currently, licensed sellers must search a buyer’s criminal, juvenile offense and mental health history via the Pennsylvania State Police’s Instant Check System. Yet that requirement can be avoided in the event the system experiences an electronic outage or other technical problem lasting longer than two days.
Parker’s bill would eliminate that exception and also increase the amount that gun merchants and buyers would need to pay to fund the background check system. Fees on sellers would increase from $2 to $6 and charges borne by purchasers would rise from $3 to $10.
Neither of Parker’s measures appear likely to pass, given the pro-gun rights makeup of the Republican caucuses that control both houses of the General Assembly. A procedural vote to advance a ban on semiautomatic weapons received only one GOP vote when it came up in May.
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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].
