Trump rally shooting puts Pa. gun laws in sights

At 20, the man who opened fire at a rally for former President Donald Trump in Butler was too young to buy a handgun in Pennsylvania. But his weapon of choice wasn’t a pistol or revolver.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, legally bought the AR-15 style rifle he used to shoot into the crowd, killing one, wounding two others and injuring Trump’s right ear. He was over 18 — the minimum age for buying a long gun in the state, which gun safety advocates say is dangerously low.

And it’s possible he slipped through a loophole in the state’s background check system: private long gun sales. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Wednesday that Crooks bought the gun from his father — an individual seller who didn’t need to perform a background check the way a licensed gun dealer would. That transaction between father and son is legal in Pennsylvania.

But it might not be if the state General Assembly had acted to ensure universal background checks. A bill proposing background checks for all firearm sales, regardless of barrel length, passed the state House of Representatives in May 2023.

“And it’s been languishing in the state Senate Judiciary Committee , untouched for over a year,” said Josh Fleitman, campaign director of CeaseFirePA , which advocates for gun violence prevention laws in the state. Wray said during his testimony that Crooks bought the gun from his father in October 2023 .

Senate Judiciary Chair Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne County, told a reporter in November she has no plans to advance the bills. But she said she would consider other proposals that are “constitutional, enforceable and practical.” Other legislators have taken the position that existing criminal charges, like reckless endangerment, already address negligence by gun owners.

Gun safety advocates have long argued that stricter regulation is needed to curb all types of gun violence here, from mass shootings to firearm suicides to community violence that disproportionately affects Black and brown Pennsylvanians, but doesn’t attract national media coverage .

Advocates are backing five pieces of gun legislation introduced last year, nearly all of which they say would address the circumstances surrounding the Butler shooting. In addition to strengthening background checks, the bills would:

• Ban semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15, which quickly load and fire rounds and can be more lethal
• Raise the minimum age to purchase all long guns from 18 to 21
• Require safe storage of firearms in homes
• Allow for extreme risk protection orders , which temporarily keep a person from accessing guns if a judge deems them a threat to themselves or others, mirroring “ red flag laws ” in numerous other states.

The two bills that passed in the Democratic-led House — for universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders — haven’t moved in the Republican-led Senate.

“There are gaping holes in Pennsylvania’s gun safety system,” said Fleitman, noting it’s impossible to know if enacting these bills would have thwarted Crooks, who was unknown to the FBI and may have passed a background check.

“But we do know that filling those holes would save lives,” he added, pointing to lower gun death rates in New York and California , which have the most robust gun safety laws in the nation, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety .

Gun rights advocates, on the other hand, say these measures would trample on the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners.

“The other side will always clamp down on something like this and see it as an opportunity to push for further gun control,” said Jim Stoker, president of Firearm Owners Against Crime [FOAC] Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action, which advocates for safe and legal gun ownership in the region.

“And the one thing that we have seen consistent in history is that more gun control just means more infringements on [those who are] law-abiding,” he added.

PublicSource spoke with gun policy experts and advocates on both sides in Western Pennsylvania after the Butler shooting. They described how they’re processing an act of violence that happened so close to home — for which a motive is still unclear .

Varied youth attitudes on guns

Crooks lived in a home that had more than a dozen guns , was a member of a private gun club and may have failed to make his high school rifle team, according to news reports. The Bethel Park School District says it has no record of Crooks’ tryout, but acknowledged it’s possible he attended a practice. Sixteen Southwestern Pennsylvania schools have rifle teams , half of which are south of the City of Pittsburgh.

Stoker grew up in South Park in the 1980s, minutes from the Crooks family home in Bethel Park. Guns were woven into the fabric of South Hills neighborhoods, where children learned to shoot through school rifle teams, Boy Scouts activities and family hunting trips.

Stoker believes young people are losing interest in those traditions: Few people under age 40 attend FOAC’s free classes on concealed carry laws , which Stoker attributes to an “anti-gun agenda” that younger generations absorbed through media.

“It’s shoved down people’s throats to where it actually makes it seem as if the firearm itself is a thing of evil,” he said, explaining his view that individuals commit crimes that shouldn’t taint all gun owners.

A study last year found that a majority of American youth and young adults think gun violence is a problem. A quarter have experienced an active shooter lockdown, and they know, on average, at least one person who was killed or injured by a gun, according to the research by Everytown for Gun Safety, the Southern Poverty Law Center and American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab .

But it also found that many young people share Stoker’s beliefs, which chalk gun violence up to the behavior of “bad” or “irresponsible” or mentally ill individuals, rather than systems-level economic and health care problems.

The researchers wrote that “youth with stronger male supremacist and racist attitudes tended to: hold stronger to the belief that adults in school should be armed, hold stronger to the belief that they are safer with guns than without guns and reported stronger trust in police.”

Gun safety advocates want to raise the minimum age for all firearm sales because young people — especially men and boys under 25 — could be more prone to gun violence . Their brains aren’t fully developed, they have weaker impulse control and they may not have been socialized to seek help or handle aggression in healthy ways.

‘Limited’ link between mental illness and gun violence

Instead of restricting access to guns, Stoker wants policymakers to shore up weaknesses in the mental health care system to prevent more gun violence.

“I think they’re outmanned,” said Stoker, a former police officer who watched people cycle in and out of the system.

Research shows mental illness plays an important but limited role in gun violence — despite how often the two are linked in media coverage — and instead points to factors including income inequality , underperforming schools , underfunded public housing, lack of opportunities and easy access to firearms.

Fleitman said it’s important not to treat people with mental illnesses like they’re inherently violent; they’re much more likely to harm themselves or be victims, not perpetrators, of gun violence.

“Every country in the world has people with mental illness,” he added. “ But we’re the only country … that seems to have this chronic issue of mass shootings and ever-present gun violence.”

Fleitman said firearm suicides and mass shootings tend to be triggered by an acute mental health crisis, not chronic mental illness.

“You lost your job, you got dumped, you got evicted , your political worldview is under assault,” he said. “Being in a moment of crisis and then having access to a gun — that’s the risk factor.”

‘Not a national leader’ on gun safety

Gary Bayne thought of Pennsylvania’s gun safety laws while he watched news coverage of the Butler shooting.

“If you have to be 21 to buy a pistol, why isn’t it 21 to buy a semi-automatic rifle?” asked Bayne, a hunter education instructor in Robinson and gun safety advocate working with CeaseFirePA . “That was one of the first things that came to mind.”

He noted that state law doesn’t differentiate between types of long guns : 18-year-olds can buy both manually operated hunting rifles and more powerful semi-automatic weapons like the one Crooks used.

Advocates say Pennsylvania lacks some important laws that can save lives: Unlike 26 other states, it doesn’t have a safe storage law , which keeps kids away from guns in their homes. And it doesn’t have an extreme risk law that allows for quick intervention before a person in crisis uses a gun. The advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety put Pennsylvania at No. 17 when ranking states based on the strength of its gun laws.

“Pennsylvania is certainly not a national leader in terms of gun safety laws, but it’s making progress and has some important laws,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, the group’s senior director of research.

She praised the gun safety bills that were introduced to the General Assembly last year, which could move the needle on the state’s non-fatal gun injury rate.

“If they’re enacted, they would move Pennsylvania from having the 15th highest rate to having a much, much lower rate of non-fatal gun injuries,” she added.

A criminal defense attorney who’s represented gun owners said Pennsylvania places more restrictions on gun owners than many other states, including requiring concealed carry permits.

Adding more laws to the books could be a slippery slope toward “trampling all over the Second Amendment,” said Marc Daffner, senior partner and managing attorney of Daffner & Associates in Pittsburgh.

Stoker isn’t buying that more gun laws will stop mass shootings or any other type of gun violence. He “never beat a victim to a crime” when he was a cop, and wants people to be able to protect themselves with guns, if necessary.

“You’re never going to be able to legislate evil out of society,” he said. “I think that’s a fairy tale.”

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @venuris .

This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.

This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

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