Swing-State Dem Announces Plan To Tie Up Gun Stores With Red Tape

A Pennsylvania lawmaker declared his intention to pass new regulations targeting gun stores in the state, according to a memo released Monday.

Democratic Pennsylvania state Rep. Christopher Rabb said the “Establishing the Firearms Dealer Accountability and Modernization Act” would seek to address gun violence through the “supply side” in the memo seeking co-sponsors for the legislation. Rabb decried the fact that there were over 3,000 federally-licensed dealers (FFLs) in the state.

“Pennsylvania has nearly seven times as many licensed gun dealers as Starbucks locations. It has more gun dealers than there are ATF special agents in the entire country,” Rabb wrote.

Rabb’s proposed legislation would require any FFL to undergo an annual inspection by the Pennsylvania State Police. The bill also requires the reporting of lost or stolen firearms and would offer “grants” to assist FFLs who want to “modernize” operations while also training inspectors for the state police’s new role.

Rabb linked to a bill he introduced in 2023, HB 1852, that included a requirement for FFLs to photograph the license plates of cars of firearms purchasers as well as their drivers’ license, a $500 a day fine for those who failed to report lost or stolen firearms and to maintain a video surveillance system that would retain footage for at least one year.

In April, Democratic Michigan state Sen. Stephanie Chang introduced SB 853 and SB 854, a pair of bills seeking to impose similar requirements on Michigan gun stores, including requiring them to obtain a state license by fulfilling a number of requirements, one of which is obtaining a FFL.

In its text, SB853 states that 18 months after enactment, every gun store must have a license from the state of Michigan in addition to its FFL. However, in the new Section 12c(4)(a) the bill creates in Michigan law, one requirement to get a state license for a gun store is for the applicant to “[have] been granted and [hold] a federal firearms license.”

According to the ATF’s website on applying for a FFL, however, in order to be granted a FFL, the applicant must be in full compliance with state and local laws and requirements. In the instructions for the application form one must fill out, the ATF indicates that applicants must have state and local licenses.

In addition to the paradoxical process that would be imposed by SB 853, SB 854 requires gun store owners to maintain various security and surveillance systems in their business establishments, with a requirement to have video surveillance that would be continuous while the store is open – and would trigger when activated by motion sensors when the business is closed. The videos would need to be of sufficient resolution to identify people purchasing firearms, and the text appears to mandate the purchase of multiple cameras and to keep the footage available for six years.

Storage requirements for a 1080p high-definition camera are about 35 gigabytes (GB) per day per camera, according to Optiview, a company that manufactures surveillance systems. Optiview estimates that the storage space requirements for 30 days at 1080p format would be 640 GB per day for a 16-camera setup – about 19 terabytes (TB) per month, while a calculator from Western Digital puts the storage requirements for keeping one year of footage from a 12-camera system taking 1920×1080 video at just over 181 TB.