Pa. House gun bill vote debate leads to expletive-fueled shouting match among lawmakers in Capitol

HARRISBURG — A fiery state House debate on a gun bill turned into a ugly shouting match on the floor Wednesday, that included expletives and a comment taken as a threatening racial epithet, according to lawmakers who witnessed the events.

The fight over gun legislation was the most raucous in recent memory, to the point that House Speaker Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, closed the session by admonishing her colleagues and suggesting that some of their behavior had crossed the line from legislative debate into unlawful threats.

“While information is still being gathered, and from this seat I cannot hear what insults and slurs are said across the aisle to each other, let me remind each of you — if you make threats, that could be a crime,” McClinton said. “Our neighbors did not send us here for us to have schoolyard fights, to be bullies.”

During the debate over a bill to ban devices that turn semi-automatic weapons effectively into machine guns, Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia, gave a pitched rebuttal to some of his Republican colleagues’ points.

In closing his remarks, Kenyatta questioned the sincerity of some members’ assertions that guns are a necessary hazard to ensure that citizens can overthrow a tyrannical government, given that those same members don’t object to what Kenyatta described as tyrannical behavior from President Donald Trump.

“Save me your self-righteous speeches about standing up to tyranny when you do nothing to stand up to tyranny consistently,” Kenyatta said, causing the House floor to erupt in a cacophony of shouting, with McClinton ordering the Sergeant-at-Arms to clear the aisles and for members to return to their seats.

According to lawmakers who were on the floor, a Republican member began admonishing Kenyatta as he walked back to his seat, putting his finger close to Kenyatta’s face. At some point, a comment was made that was seen by some members as threatening and racially-coded. Kenyatta is Black.

The dispute caused other members to get out of their seats and join into the fracas. The confrontation was heated and involved the yelling of expletives, but remained purely verbal and did not escalate to the point of physical contact, according to several members.

“My reverence for this chamber and commitment to serious solutions to our commonwealth’s problems remains unshakable,” Kenyatta said in a message Wednesday afternoon. “But I will never allow myself to be bullied or threatened into silence. Not by a colleague or anyone else.”

The bill at issue would ban “machinegun conversion devices,” defined in the bill as “a part or combination of parts designed and intended to accelerate the rate of fire of a semiautomatic firearm to simulate the rate of fire of a machinegun.”

The ban was targeted toward so-called “Glock switches” - devices which can be added to Glocks or other handguns with similar operating mechanisms to allow for fully-automatic fire. The devices are heavily restricted under federal law but not under state statute, and homemade switches — often 3D-printed — have been showing up in crimes with increasing frequency, according to law enforcement.

“Every single police officer I know wants a state-level ban on these devices. Our police should not be going up against these things,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mandy Steele, D-Allegheny County.

Steele’s district is home to Brackenridge, whose police chief, Justin McIntire, was shot and killed during a 2023 manhunt in which the suspect had a machinegun switch installed on his pistol. States much more right-leaning than Pennsylvania have banned the devices, Steele pointed out, and the ban is also supported by the Glock company and other manufacturers.

“It’s really disheartening and it’s disgusting that the fallen police chief Justin McIntire’s family was at home watching and had to see that,” Steele said of the incident on Wednesday.

The tempers-flaring exchange came a day after two pieces of proposed gun regulation were voted down in the House by a 101-102 margin, with a third bill narrowly passing.

Democrats hold a one-seat majority in the 203-member House. The firearms bills that were voted down this week failed on 101-to-102 votes, with Rep. Frank Burns, D-Cambria County, opposing the bills alongside every Republican.

Burns, who represents a district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, said in an interview Tuesday night that his votes represented his constituents, who generally view the added layers of gun laws as government overreach. Burns also opposed most gun legislation last session, and has bucked his party on a handful of issues that he’s said are too liberal for his constituents to support.

Much of Wednesday’s debate dealt with the philosophical question of constitutional gun rights rather than the legal details of Steele’s bill. At one point during his speech, Kenyatta critiqued the argument made by some Republicans that new gun laws would be useless because they wouldn’t deter criminals, quipping that “if that is true, we have no reason to be here,” even though “we create new crimes in this building like some people change their socks.”

Some debate did address specific legal issues, such as whether the bill’s definition of “machinegun conversion devices” would include not just Glock switches but also “bump stocks” and other rapid-fire accessories, which have been found by the U.S. Supreme Court to not meet the federal definition of a machinegun conversion.

“When you look at that definition it is actually inconsistent with the language that was in the co-sponsorship memo,” said Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County, and would likely prove problematic if a court were to take up a challenge to the law.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Tim Briggs, D-Montgomery County, urged colleagues to not dwell on hypothetical constitutional challenges, quoting the opinion of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative, in the landmark Heller case.

“The right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Scalia wrote, and court precedents show “the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

The House adjourned Wednesday and will return on Monday, giving lawmakers four days to cool off.

“We will do better because we know how to do better,” McClinton told members. “Before this morning, I’ve seen this institution do much better.”

During Wednesday’s debate, GOP floor leader Jesse Topper, R-Bedford County, had raised multiple points of order to caution members against impugning the motives of others, with members on both sides having complained that their intentions were being misrepresented.

“Tensions are high in the building for an obvious number of reasons,” Topper said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “However, not matter the issue or the topic, we as elected officials should conduct ourselves in a manner that is reflective of this great institution and the fine communities we all represent.”