Pennsylvania Democrat Targets Gun Stores With New Bill

In my piece yesterday on what the gun control lobby is likely to focus on if the Supreme Court strikes down bans on so-called assault weapons, I brought up crackdowns on gun stores. While I focused more on zoning laws and other efforts to keep stores from opening for business, anti-gun Democrats are also going to ramp up attacks on stores that are already serving customers. 

We’ve already seen several states introduce state-level licensing for gun dealers, which comes replete with more rules, regulations, and requirements for commercial gun sellers, and those efforts appear to be ramping up ahead of the Supreme Court’s next term, when the justices will decide whether “assault weapon” bans in Cook County, Illinois and the state of Connecticut violate the Second Amendment. 

Pennsylvania is one of those states. In fact, it’s had its licensing law in place for several decades, but unlike more recent dealer licensing measures it isn’t all that intrusive. That could soon change, though. State Rep. Christopher Rabb, a Philadelphia-area Democrat, has announced his intent to introduce the “Firearms Dealer Accountability and Modernization Act” when lawmakers return to Harrisburg in just a few months. 

In his memo to fellow lawmakers, Rabb declared that “with more than 3,000 federally licensed firearms dealers across Pennsylvania, we must determine which establishments are complicit” in what Rabb calls a  “public health crisis.” Rabb claims his bill “focuses on the bad actors while providing support for good-faith dealers seeking to modernize their operations.”

This bill seeks to reduce gun violence in three ways.
 
First, it would require the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) or their designees to conduct annual inspections of federally licensed firearms dealers.
 
Second, it would codify a duty to report lost or stolen firearms or ammunition.
 
Third, it would establish two programs: one to provide grants to federally licensed firearms dealers to modernize their operations, and another to fund PSP-led recruitment, training, and oversight of designees who verify that dealers properly store and secure their firearms sales records, consistent with federal law. It bears emphasizing: the more we empower law enforcement and their designees to inspect gun dealers, the safer we make our streets for everyone — including the officers tasked to protect and serve.
 
Data collected through this process can help identify which of the state’s firearms dealers account for a disproportionate share of handgun sales later linked to homicides. The legislation would also authorize random inspections of dealers fitting that sales profile, and would treat firearms held on consignment as inventory.

We don’t have the text of Rabb’s bill yet, but there are some areas of concern. First, will it include any additional requirements for FFLs that don’t currently exist under state or federal law? 

Then there’s the way the bill supposedly identifies suspected “bad apples.” In 2023 there were 693 gun-involved homicides throughout the state. That number is undoubtedly less today, since both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have documented notable declines in murders in both 2024 and 2025. With more than 3,000 FFLs (according to Rabb), could one or two firearms traced back to a homicide result in a dealer having a  “disproportionate share” of sales? Does the length of time between the original sale and the homicide matter? And what about those homicides in which a gun is never recovered? 

Rabb’s bill could easily end up targeting high-volume gun stores that aren’t doing anything wrong just because of its screwy metric in determining whether a dealer should have more scrutiny placed on them. 

Then there’s the language about “designees” of the state police conducting inspections. Who, exactly, will those be? Local police? Third-party contractors? Employees of the governor’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention? 

This sounds like one of those “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” proposals that don’t end up helping anyone at all. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the actual language of Rabb’s proposal, but based on his sales pitch to legislators I can’t see this being anything worthy of support.  

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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