Lawmaker’s Bill ‘Decouples’ Pennsylvania’s Law From NFA

The National Firearms Act might well be in the last years of its existence. We’ve already legislated the tax stamp for suppressors and short-barreled rifles away, which was grounds for a federal court to declare the registration requirement unconstitutional. Machine guns are still there, as are destructive devices, but the truth is that more and more people want machine guns removed from the NFA list, and destructive devices aren’t nearly as relevant to most people’s interests as guns are.

Of course, registration at $200 plus cost each might have something to do with that.

Still, on actual firearms, the tides have shifted like I never expected to see in my lifetime. That means some states need to start doing some planning. One of those is Pennsylvania, but one lawmaker has a plan.

PA Representative Rob Kauffman said, “What it did is it included in some of the regulations registration, but also a fee, a tax, and so the courts held that it was constitutional because of that tax, kind of like Obamacare. Remember, the Roberts Court said, oh, Obamacare is legal because oh, it’s actually a tax. Same deal with this issue, but within the one big beautiful bill, they removed the fee, the tax part of it. That’s great. That’s something that will likely be working through the courts and or the federal government determining what they are going to enforce out of the National Firearms Act.”

Some of this could put the Second Amendment community in Pennsylvania in limbo, though. 

Kauffman has proposed legislation that would separate Pennsylvania’s requirements from federal requirements so that changes or uncertainty in federal law do not automatically affect state law.

“We’re essentially just trying to decouple our regulations with the federal regulations,” Kauffman said. “Pennsylvanians know, OK, you have to comply with state law, but your compliance with state law is not contingent upon your compliance with federal law as well.”

Kauffman said gun owners would still be required to comply with both state and federal law, but Pennsylvania’s regulations would no longer be dependent on the status of the federal law.

“You have to comply with federal law. You have to comply with state law,” he said. “But we are not conditioning our compliance with state law with also the compliance of federal law.”

As I understand this, what it would mean isn’t that it would somehow lock people into regulations that no longer exist, so much as allowing for the fact that compliance with federal law won’t be anything beyond following the same laws as buying a firearm.

In other words, it opens things up because now the state regulations won’t require you to pay a non-existent tax or to be registered on a (hopefully) non-existent registry.

That means the law won’t be used to essentially ban items that are no longer regulated, all without having to pass a single new measure.

Will it work? Kauffman isn’t supremely confident he can get it through the very divided General Assembly, which is fair. While it’s worked in the pro-gun side’s favor over the last handful of years, that’s a double-edged sword.

Still, if my read is right, it’s important and I hope Kauffman can pull it off.

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