HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — State House Republicans on Tuesday blocked a proposal to prevent those ages 18 to 21 from owning assault rifles by completely turning the law into a constitutional amendment allowing anyone to carry concealed weapons .
It was the second straight week that Republicans used their majority on the Judiciary Committee to defeat Democrat proposals to end gun violence in the country.
The law would have barred anyone under the age of 21 from buying, owning, or transporting guns, which were often used to kill and wound people in the mass shootings that have become an epidemic in the United States.
The so-called “constitutional carry” has broad support among Legislative Republicans, but a bill allowing it was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in December.
Rep. Joe Hohenstein, D-Philadelphia, called the unrestricted right to bear arms a myth that leads to the kind of violence seen in the Wild West.
“We can say anything we want about how guns make some people safer, they make a whole lot of other people less safe, too,” he said during the brief Capitol hearing. There is violence with legally purchased weapons, he noted. “It’s the legal purchases of firearms that become the mass shootings that we see.”
The vote went almost along party line, with only one Republican — from the Philadelphia suburbs — crossing the lines to vote against.
Democrats have turned to relief resolutions, a parliamentary maneuver to get gun violence legislation out of the judiciary, where Chairman Rob Kauffman, R-Franklin, has blocked them from moving forward.
Last week, the committee voted to ask the speaker to send four more gun laws to another committee, bringing action on proposals for safe gun storage, a ban on assault weapons, a red flag law and a measure giving local governments the Power to enact their laws there, effectively stopping their own safeguards.
“This is not the way to legislate,” Montgomery County Assemblyman Tim Briggs, the ranking Democrat for the judiciary, said Tuesday. “We shouldn’t have to take discharge decisions on bills that are 70, 80% popular across the Commonwealth.”
All but one Republican on the committee also voted in favor of a proposal to amend the state constitution to give the General Assembly the power to enact rules about where civil lawsuits may be filed.
Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Allegheny, said lawmakers “should not control the judiciary through constitutional amendments when it comes to setting their own rules for the progress of cases.”
An attempt by Briggs to demand a public hearing on the measure was also opposed by the committee’s Republicans, who had virtually nothing to say on either bill.