The Republican National Convention is underway in Milwaukee, and despite the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, guns are allowed near the convention site because of Wisconsin’s preemption law, which prevents local municipalities from enacting gun regulations stricter than the state’s.
This means in the densely populated city blocks surrounding the Fiserv Forum, the event’s venue, people are allowed to carry loaded weapons concealed with a permit, and openly without, even AR-15s like the weapon used in the July 13 assassination attempt. Meanwhile, more innocuous items like tennis balls, coolers, and metal water bottles, along with air rifles and BB guns, are banned.
Over the past few decades, preemption laws have spread across the country, with 45 states now having some version on the books, including Pennsylvania, where Trump survived the attempt on his life at a weekend rally. Because of recent events, the laws are facing renewed scrutiny.
“Had the city of Milwaukee had the possibility of restricting firearms around the convention site, we would have established those restrictions,” Jeff Fleming, a spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, told The Trace in an email. “We accept reasonable firearm restrictions at airports or major sporting events. Why wouldn’t we want to keep guns away from a polarizing political event?”
Police in Milwaukee arrested a man wearing a ski mask near the RNC during the convention’s first day for allegedly carrying a gun in a “tactical” backpack without a concealed carry permit.
Gun rights supporters argue that states need a uniform system of gun regulations, not a confusing patchwork. But in cities like Milwaukee, where gun violence is a persistent problem, preemption has consistently frustrated local officials, barring them from implementing measures tailored to their particular public safety needs.
After the RNC concludes, Milwaukee will continue to grapple with day-to-day gun violence. The city recorded 172 homicides and more than 800 nonfatal shootings in 2023. As in most other cities, homicides and non-fatal shootings in Milwaukee have declined in the past year, but remain above 2019 levels.
“State lawmakers have prevented the city of Milwaukee from enacting any reasonable firearm restrictions,” Fleming said. “The Mayor has been clear: We need to have gun laws that keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.”
In Pennsylvania, where the shooter at Trump’s rally injured the former president, killed an attendee, and wounded two others, the landscape of firearm regulation is similar to Wisconsin’s. Firearms were banned inside a Secret Service-controlled zone immediately surrounding the venue, a fairgrounds in the city of Butler. Outside that specific zone, where the Secret Service’s jurisdiction stopped, people could legally carry firearms under Pennsylvania law.
Law enforcement has not said whether Pennsylvania’s carry laws affected their response to the assassination attempt. The Secret Service and the Pennsylvania State Police did not respond to a request for comment.
Preemption laws are not just in conservative states. Many states with strict gun laws, like Illinois and Washington, also have them. Two states — California and Colorado — have limited preemption laws, enabling cities to more strictly regulate some aspects of firearms, but not others. The remaining 43 states have made gun regulation the sole domain of their state legislatures.
Most preemption laws were enacted in the 1980s, when the National Rifle Association embarked on a nationwide campaign to press state lawmakers into curtailing local authority.
These States Prevent Cities From Enacting Tougher Gun Laws
The vast majority of states have preemption laws, which prohibit cities, counties, and other localities from enacting gun laws that are stricter than the state’s.
It’s unlikely that local officials in Butler County, a conservative Republican stronghold north of Pittsburgh, would have enacted stricter firearm regulations even if they had the authority to do so. The effect of preemption laws is clearer in Pennsylvania’s two largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where local officials have faced significant hurdles in enacting their own gun rules amid persistent daily gun violence and recent mass shootings.
In Pittsburgh, after a mass shooting killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, city leaders passed stricter gun control measures, including an assault weapons ban. Legal challenges followed, and a judge eventually struck down the measures as a violation of preemption.
In 2020, a Pennsylvania judge struck down a Philadelphia ordinance requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms within 24 hours. The city has moved to appeal that decision. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, gun reform groups, and the city of Philadelphia are pursuing a separate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s preemption law. That case is before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has yet to rule.
Ben Geffen, an attorney at The Public Interest Law Center who represents the gun reform groups in the suit, said the case is “a bit of a last-ditch effort” to limit the scope of preemption and provide more leeway for cities to tackle gun violence.
“Even though assault weapons might be a real headline-grabbing issue anytime there’s a well-publicized shooting,” Geffen said, “the day-in, day-out grind of handgun violence is where the most lives are at stake.”
In June, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal rule banning bump stocks — accessories that make semiautomatic rifles fire more like machine guns — Philadelphia outlawed the devices. It took only days for two local gun owners to challenge the ordinance under preemption.
Back in Wisconsin, a group of Democrats unsuccessfully pursued bills in the Senate and Assembly earlier this year that would have repealed the state’s firearm preemption law.
State Senator Chris Larson, who sponsored the bill in his chamber, said the legislation was inspired by concerns over guns at the RNC. “The city didn’t have the authority to be able to say, ‘Let’s make sure we have smarter gun laws with a lot of politically charged folks all hanging out in our city,’” said Larson, who represents part of Milwaukee.
He said he plans to refile the legislation when lawmakers return next year.
“Like a lot of American cities, compared to international counterparts, we’ve got an epidemic of gun violence,” Larson said. “Being able to put forward laws to at least attempt to stem that is important and is publicly popular. The least that we can and should do is to try to protect our neighbors.”
