Apr 4, 2023 5 min read

Martin School in the School District of Lancaster has students in kindergarten through eighth grade. That means most of the students there are younger than 14.

And yet one brought a gun to school.

Thankfully, the firearm wasn’t loaded, or else this could have gone a whole different and terrible way.

We actually don’t need to imagine what might have happened. Abigail Zwerner, a first grade teacher in Virginia, was shot by a 6-year-old student in her classroom in January.

The Virginia boy’s family claimed in a statement that the 9 mm handgun – legally purchased by the boy’s mother – had been “secured” in their home. Nevertheless, the boy was able to get his hands on the gun and carry it to school in his backpack, police said.

Because she’s a teacher, Zwerner’s first thought was that she needed to get her other students, whom she called “my babies,” to safety – despite the serious injuries she sustained (ruptured bones in her hand, a bullet in her chest, a collapsed lung).

Last week, she told NBC’s “Today” show that the shooting has “changed me. It’s changed my life.”

Of course it has. Shootings – no matter where they take place – change even the lives they don’t claim.

And their prevalence has altered our national psyche; the threat of gun violence is pervasive.

Which is why we keep imploring the Pennsylvania Legislature to pass sensible gun legislation.

In the Virginia case, the 6-year-old will not be charged, but the local prosecutor told NBC News that he is still reviewing the case to determine whether anyone else should face criminal charges. We hope the adults in that child’s home face some consequences.

Virginia has no laws requiring the safe storage of guns, but it is at least illegal in that state to leave a loaded, unsecured firearm “in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of any child under the age of 14.”

Pennsylvania, however, has “no law that imposes a penalty on someone who fails to secure an unattended firearm and leaves it accessible to an unsupervised minor,” according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The gun that the Lancaster student took to school had been reported stolen – which is good. But there’s no Pennsylvania law that requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement.

Lancaster city passed its own such ordinance in 2009 but was sued in 2015 by the National Rifle Association. The NRA cited a long-standing Pennsylvania law that prohibits municipalities from enacting regulations that, as The Philadelphia Inquirer explained, “are stricter than what is allowed in state law.”

The lawsuit eventually was dropped, but it had the chilling effect the NRA undoubtedly hoped it would.

Philadelphia now hopes that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will strike down the state’s preemption law as unconstitutional. Beset by a crisis of gun violence, that city is seeking to implement its own gun ordinances, including one that would require reporting lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement.

No wonder.

As the Associated Press reported last week, “Since 2018, Pennsylvania’s Legislature – long controlled by Republicans – has not seriously entertained any new firearm restrictions.”

In fact, lawmakers have gone – and continue to go – to great lengths to pander to the gun lobby.

Could that change now that Democrats narrowly control the state House and the Democratic former state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, is governor?

That was the hope of those who rallied at the state Capitol in Harrisburg last month to mark the fifth anniversary of March For Our Lives, a movement launched after the February 2018 shooting in which 14 students and three staff members were fatally shot at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

We share their hope.

But we know that it won’t be easy to convince enough state lawmakers to finally pass the commonsense reforms that polls show the majority of Pennsylvanians want.

Consider these remarks, reported by the AP and uttered Thursday by Franklin County state Rep. Rob Kauffman, the ranking Republican on the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee.

Kauffman offered up the usual pro-gun lobby blather: Stricter gun laws won’t stop criminals who commit crimes with guns. And he took issue with those who compare driving laws with gun regulation.

“I know it’s hard for folks with serious tragedies to relate to that, but many of us, that’s where our minds are – that you cannot affiliate a driver’s license and gun ownership because one is a constitutional right and one is not,” he said.

The flip side of this statement is that gun-rights advocates like Kauffman cannot relate to the “folks” driven by tragedy to rally outside the state Capitol for gun safety legislation.

What Kauffman also seems to be saying is that the Second Amendment trumps the “unalienable rights” promised in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He implies that government has been rendered powerless by the Second Amendment to pass laws to improve gun safety. But not even the late conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believed that.

In 2008, Scalia wrote, “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. (It is) not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

Unfortunately, many Pennsylvania lawmakers are too cowardly to take on even the mildest gun safety reforms – like requiring safe storage or the reporting of stolen guns. They offer up legislation pandering to culture-war concerns because that’s easier than addressing the actual harms that firearms pose to Pennsylvanians – children, teachers, all of us.

We could resign ourselves to a future in which schoolchildren will continue getting their hands on firearms, and lawmakers in Harrisburg will continue to serve up platitudes and excuses. But we deserve better, so let’s demand better.