Pennsylvania Democrat Files Memo to Put State Police Inside All 3,000-Plus Licensed Gun Dealers Once a Year

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HARRISBURG, PA — A Philadelphia Democrat in the Pennsylvania House has filed a co-sponsorship memo announcing legislation that would send the Pennsylvania State Police, or people the agency designates, into every federally licensed gun store in the state once a year.

Rep. Christopher Rabb’s co-sponsorship memo calls the proposal the “Firearms Dealer Accountability and Modernization Act.” In it, Rabb writes that “with more than 3,000 federally licensed firearms dealers across Pennsylvania, we must determine which establishments are complicit” in what he calls a public health crisis. The bill, he says, “focuses on the bad actors while providing support for good-faith dealers seeking to modernize their operations.”

The memo describes three mechanisms:

• Require the Pennsylvania State Police, or their designees, to conduct annual inspections of federally licensed firearms dealers.
• Codify a duty to report lost or stolen firearms or ammunition.
• Establish two programs: one issuing grants to licensed dealers to modernize their operations, and another funding State Police recruitment, training and oversight of designees who verify that dealers properly store and secure their firearms sales records, consistent with federal law.

The heaviest word in that list is “designees.” Federally licensed dealers already operate under federal recordkeeping rules and are already subject to federal inspection. What the memo proposes adding is a state layer on top of that: a guaranteed annual visit, and a trained pool of people who are not sworn officers with authority to walk into a licensed business and go through its paperwork.

The framing matters as much as the mechanics. Rabb’s stated starting point is that some unknown share of Pennsylvania’s 3,000-plus dealers are “complicit,” and that the job of the state is to determine which ones. Everyone gets inspected annually so the state can sort the group. Dealers who satisfy the process are offered grant money to modernize. That is a compliance structure built on the premise that a licensed retailer is a suspect pool to be narrowed rather than a regulated business to be audited when there is cause.

The lost-and-stolen reporting piece is the least remarkable part of the package. Plenty of dealers already report theft to federal authorities as a matter of course. Codifying it in state law creates a separate state penalty exposure for a paperwork failure, which is a real change for a small shop, but it is not the part of this memo that redraws the relationship between the state and the counter.

Gun Owners of America reported that on September 22, 2025, the House Judiciary Committee advanced four gun control bills on a strictly party-line vote, with every Democrat in favor and every Republican opposed. GOA identified them as HB 1099, which the group describes as making it a third-degree felony to manufacture, sell, possess or transfer a firearm made entirely of non-metal material; HB 1593, which GOA says would bar private long gun sales without government permission first and, in GOA’s characterization, set the stage for a statewide firearms transaction registry; HB 1859, creating red flag orders that GOA calls ex parte proceedings, meaning a judge can order firearms seized in a hearing the gun owner is not present for; and HB 1866, a ban on machine gun conversion devices that GOA argues duplicates existing federal law.

GOA also reported two outcomes worth noting. HB 837, Rep. Shusterman’s bill limiting handgun purchases to one per month, was passed over after Rep. Dan Miller entered a “No” vote. And a Republican amendment from Chairman Rob Kauffman that would have substituted constitutional carry for one of the anti-gun bills was defeated on party lines.

NRA-ILA has been flagging the same pattern, publishing a June 2026 alert headlined “Pennsylvania: House Majority Democrats Pushing More Gun Control Next Week.”

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A co-sponsorship memo is not a bill. There is no bill number, no filed text, no committee referral and no scheduled vote, and introduced language routinely differs from what a memo promises. The statute gets judged when there is a statute to judge.

Dealer-side regulation rarely draws the attention that carry bills and hardware bans do, because it does not restrict what any individual may buy or carry. It shapes who is still open on a Saturday morning to sell it. I will continue tracking this proposal and the rest of the Pennsylvania package as the session moves.