Religious leaders call for stricter gun laws in Pennsylvania

This story originally appeared on WITF.

The number of shootings, gun murders, and suicides using firearms is rising across the country.

Mass shootings are commonplace in the U.S. and although they get most of the attention, they don’t happen nearly as often as a shooting on the street or in a home. Philadelphia and other large cities are setting records for gun deaths but here in Central Pennsylvania, not a week goes by that we don’t hear of a shooting nearby.

No one has been able to identify any one reason why gun violence is increasing – other than the availability of guns.

For years, there have been impassioned pleas for stricter gun laws. It has turned out to be one of the most divisive political issues of our time.

A new group — the Saving Lives: Ending Gun Violence Committee — led by the religious community, in particular Pennsylvania’s Episcopal Diocese, is calling for tougher gun laws.

On The Spark Tuesday, The Rev. Jennifer Mattson, Rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Lancaster and Chair of the committee outlined the laws the group is advocating for, “Limiting purchases to one handgun a month to make it harder for illegal handgun trafficking to occur, an extreme risk protection order, which would be a temporary judicial removal of (guns)... Prohibition on the sales of assault weapons and large capacity ammunition style magazines, which, by the way, are the weapons most typically used for mass shootings, and then a prohibition on the sale and the possession of ghost guns. So these are the parts of guns that are kits that can be available that people can then put together their own gun that wouldn’t have identifying markers or information, which can make it more difficult actually, for law enforcement to solve crimes.”

When asked about the argument that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives Americans the right to bear arms and that new laws would infringe on those rights, The Rt. Rev. Audrey C. Scanlan, Bishop of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania said, “I don’t think that we are looking to take guns away from people who use them in responsible ways, in ways that are recreational or even in the cases of people who feel that they need a gun in their home to protect themselves. We’re not we’re not trying to take guns away from those people for those reasons. What we are asking to see is sensible legislation that will get illegal guns off the streets, that will reduce what’s called the iron pipeline of the number of illegal guns that make their way in and through Pennsylvania.

And there are statistics or numbers that really tell a compelling story out of New Jersey. So we think of New Jersey as a place that probably one would imagine the same amount of gun violence as our own commonwealth. And yet they’ve been working very hard at gun legislation in New Jersey and they have put into effect three of the four measures that we’re talking about. The one handgun a month law has been passed there. The prohibition on assault weapons has been passed there and the prohibition on ghost guns or kind of make your own gun. And let me share a couple of numbers with you. In truth, in 2020, there were 1752 gun deaths in our commonwealth. And in New Jersey, there were 443.”

Bishop Scanlan said the group will meet with state lawmakers to discuss the laws they would like to see enacted.