Mandy Steele's Gun Control Distraction: The Real Culprits Behind Chief McIntyre's Murder

The PA House devolved into an expletive filled shouting match at the Capital on October 1 following a speech by local House Rep, Mandy Steele. Steel made an impassioned speech that heavily cited the murder of Brackenridge Police Chief Justin McIntyre by a career criminal sporting using a pistol illegally altered to allow for automatic fire. (Brackenridge is among the communities Steele represents, providing political incentive.) Steele concluded her comments with the statement, "A no vote is you knowingly sending our police out there to face down machine guns." Debate ensued, and the bill was barely rejected 101Y-102N, while another banning private sales of long guns (rifles and shotguns) without government permission passed 104Y-99N.

Libertarians are again frustrated by the Democrats endless pushes to turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals based on the behavior of actual criminals who, by their very definition, ignore the gun laws imposed on us all, and thus only affect the law-abiding whose liberty is endlessly encroached upon and violated by politics.

But beyond that simply philosophical reality that, inherent to liberty we all have the right to protect and defend ourselves from those who pose threat to our liberty and property, there is a much deeper issue that must be addressed by Steele's efforts against gun rights.

When Chief McIntyre was murdered in January 2023, the community lost a hero. What has since followed revealed everything wrong with Democrat priorities, culminating recently with Steele exploiting his death as justification for infringing on the liberty of law-abiding gun owners with more laws.

The playbook is tiresome. A career criminal, recycled endlessly through a broken justice system, commits an atrocity—and Democrats blame hardware instead of their own catastrophic policies.

The Killer Democrats Fostered

Aaron Lamont Swan Jr., Chief McIntyre's killer, was no law-abiding gun owner obeying gun laws.

His decade-long record included assault and threatening violence against teachers, theft, armed robbery, drug trafficking, illegal firearms possession, parole violations, fleeing police, and assaults. He participated in a 2014 armed robbery where a man was shot and killed. Initially charged with homicide, prosecutors dropped that charge after he cooperated against a co-defendant, allowing him to plead down to robbery and conspiracy with a reduced sentence.

Some of Swan's lengthy criminal record can be read here.

At every turn, Allegheny County's Democrat-run justice system kept him on the streets. Charges dropped. Homicide pled down. Probation after probation. Parole violations ignored. When he ambushed Chief McIntyre, it wasn't inevitable... But the system had made it increasingly probable that someone would get hurt or killed because those running the justice system refused to do their jobs to lock up career predators.

Instead of demanding accountability for this failure, two-and-a-half-years later, Steele distracts voters with yet more Democrat sponsored gun control bills to add to the ones already ignored by criminals.

The System Failed, not 'Glock Switches'

Swan had already violated many laws that should have kept him imprisoned:

• Illegal firearms possession

• Armed robbery with homicide involvement (charges dropped, sentence reduced)

• Drug distribution

• Multiple assaults, thefts, and probation violations

• Fleeing police and resisting arrest

Every violation was an opportunity to remove him from the streets. Each time, the system released him again. By the time Chief McIntyre encountered Swan, it was after an hours-long police chase. Swan was armed, on the run, and wanted on an outstanding probation violation warrant—yet another missed chance to incarcerate a proven violent offender. Police had earlier tracked him by stolen Apple AirPods that broadcast their location.

Rather than grappling with Swan’s long record and the justice system’s repeated failures, Steele’s Harrisburg speech shifted attention to a “Glock switch” conversion device—a small piece of plastic easily produced on a 3D printer.

But Swan’s path of violence did not begin with a conversion device. It began with a justice system unwilling to incarcerate a chronic offender whose lack of accountability culminated in murder.

Banning Glock switches would not have saved Chief McIntyre’s life. They were illegal under federal law, yet Swan used one anyway. Today they remain common in inner-city gangs and drug markets and will remain so when criminals continue to meet the definition of "criminal" by ignoring laws.

What could have made a difference is enforcing the laws already on the books, ensuring incarceration, and refusing to repeatedly release a man with a proven record of criminality and violence.

The Democrat Revolving Door

This pattern repeats everywhere Democrats control prosecutors' offices: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Baltimore. Career criminals walk free until someone innocent dies.

In 2022, the Fraternal Order of Police warned: "Our communities are not safe when violent criminals are arrested only to be released back onto the streets. This is willful negligence."

Consider Charlotte, North Carolina, September 2025: Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death on a light rail train by Decarlos Brown, a man with a violent criminal record who had been arrested and released 14 times until he finally murdered an innocent commuter. Yet when conservative and libertarian politicians, podcasters, and news sources pointed out the obvious, Democrats and their News opinion makers deflected the story into criticism over right wing rage rather than one questioning the dynamics that allowed it to happen.

Chief McIntyre's death wasn't the fault of Glock trigger hardware any more than Iryna Zarutska's was the fault of Decarlos Brown's knife.

Democrats Created the Culture of Destruction

But there is an even deeper tragedy that is a cultural, fostered by Democrats embracing incremental Socialism and imbuing their messaging with Cultural Marxism¹.

Swan grew up in Pittsburgh's Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood, a community weakened since the 1960s by the compounded effects welfare policies that eventually undermined family, economy, and work stability. Later the same day he killed Chief MacIntry'e, that's where Swan would die from a shootout with Pittsburgh Police. That, after wrecking the Subaru he had stolen at gunpoint a few hours earlier, the wreck occurring while fleeing Pittsburgh Police after they noticed the stolen vehicle and tried to pull him over.

Sadly, that story alone - A stolen car, a police chase ending in a Lincoln-Larimar with a fatal shootout between thief and police -- could be a stand-alone event Pittsburgh-area residents wouldn't normally blink an eye at hearing of via the local news. Like most major U.S. cities, there are a handful of neighborhoods and city blocks from which most gun violence and other violent crimes originate. Anyone informed and speaking honestly can name those in Pittsburgh alongside Lincoln Larimar.

Brushton / Homewood

The Hill District

Brighton Heights

East Hills

Eat Pittsburgh

Mckees Rocks to Crafton Heights

And on and on...

But those problems don't exist in Bethel Park, Fox Chapel, Franklin Park, or Mount Lebanon or among any other lower-income families in any community. They are concentrated almost exclusively in neighborhoods where politicians, their friendly academics, and their government programs fostered dependency, removing the need for fathers and work by subsidizing 85-90% of children to presently be born to single mothers relying on productive taxpayers for survival. 

Thomas Sowell, the respected free market and social economist observed: "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began to come apart in the wake of the liberal welfare state."   As a black man now in his 90s and who was once a Marxist himself in the early 1960s, he witnessed this first-hand leading to his rejection of all things Marx and socialism.

As Sowell observed, decades of Democrat policies subsidized fatherless homes, rewarded dependency, and punished self-reliance. The result is predictable: too many boys raised by the streets instead of fathers. Gangs replacing families. Violence replacing discipline. Generational poverty. Enter the socialist state as caretaker, it should bear noticing, to replace the family structure that Marx and Engels infamously wanted to eradicate because families were tools of Capitalism and "contain in germ not only slavery but also serfdom".

This dysfunction is sustained by the Cultural Marxism that is further imbued into our schools and colleges, bleeding into broader culture now as Culture Wars. It has infected our courts and District Attorney offices, with Open Society leaders, George Soros' organizations spending 100s of millions to elect outright critical theory advocates into the legal system as DAs and Judges. It teaches these broken community members and democrat voters to externalize all blame onto others, familiar Marxist constructs, like "systemic racism" that use Oppressed/Oppressor narratives about White Privilege being to blame for poverty and crime, rather than confronting the very destructive community behaviors and failed Democrat policies that create the problem.

Democrats and their media allies profit from this victimhood narrative because it absolves them of responsibility while maintaining political control. Marxists love it because it gets culture fighting at itself, with the goal to replace ideas of identity, liberty, property rights, family with revolution. Politicians love it because they can rush in with taxpayer's money and excuses that buy votes.

Steele and her gun law cosponsors may naively believe their gun laws will somehow work. But their refusal to address or assume any responsibility for what truly caused Chief Macintyre's death, they're complicit in enabling more violence to continue. So, instead, their policies continue the decay but retain an important segment of their voting base kept dependent on government programs. Increasingly, the only conclusion we can come to is that they'd rather scapegoat guns than confront their preference for incentivized dependency and racial grievance.

The Distraction Game

Thomas Sowell also wrote, “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” 

Worse yet, the racism of low expectations and critical legal theory have become excuses for non-prosecution to its fullest. So those succeeding in these communities are forced to suffer the broken families and crime nurtured by democrats.

The truth is simple:

• Democrat prosecutors let Swan walk free until he murdered

• The Democrat welfare state shattered his community

• Democrat politics protect criminals while scapegoating guns and burdening the law-abiding

• Democrats rely heavily on these communities’ votes for any chance at winning elections

Steele Swore an Oath She Won't Uphold

It's important to also note, The Pennsylvania Constitution states clearly in Article I, Section 21:

"The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned."

Notice those words: in defense of themselves. Self-defense is the cornerstone of our state's gun rights.

Image of Steel's own gun platform at steeleforpa.com/platform

Yet Steele's campaign platform carefully omits this. She reduces gun rights to hunting, speaking of "responsible gun ownership" only in terms of maintaining healthy environmental ecosystems, but requiring wait periods and background checks. That's not support for the Second Amendment or the PA Constitution. It's an ideological rewrite. She swore to uphold both, not her reinvented version of it.

What This Is Really About

If Steele cared about protecting police officers, she'd demand prosecutors do their jobs and stop recycling violent offenders.

Instead, this advances the endless Big Government agenda: weaken the rights of law-abiding citizens, strip their ability to defend themselves, and avoid responsibility for the culture of dependency and violence Steel’s party created.  Those who support and vote for her should know better, especially her contributors from the Fox Chapel area that rarely if ever have to deal with the consequences of the policies they’ve empowered.

Law-abiding Pennsylvanians have every reason to demand the same tools of self-defense that criminals already possess—and that any authoritarian government might one day turn against them.

Steele's bill doesn't honor Chief McIntyre. It dishonors him by letting the system that enabled his killer off the hook while targeting the very citizens whose rights the Constitution promises "shall not be questioned."

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¹ Be cautious with sources like Wikipedia, which often reflect activist bias rather than objective scholarship, especially on politically sensitive terms such as “Cultural Marxism.” Wikipedia currently labels the concept as a “far‑right antisemitic conspiracy theory,” a framing that those familiar with Marxist Theory dismiss as a pathetic rhetorical smear to dissuade readers from rational intellectual inquiry. Similar distortions can be found when using Google’s Gemini interface, which frequently repeats Wikipedia’s language almost verbatim and cites sources used by Wikipedia. For serious inquiry, understand that Cultural Marxism is a real and explains philosophical approach to change culture from within to enable the Marxist revolution to happen by dissolving the resistance to by undermining cultural institutions like God, the family, liberty, property rights, sexuality, and as we've seen more recently, gender identity. The Heritage Foundation has a reasonably balanced piece about Cultural Marxism you can read here. And, for what it's worth, the Heritage Foundation is smeared as a far right extremist, anti semitic, racist, blah blah blah organization by the same sources.

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