Every year, Pennsylvanians are required to register their vehicles with the state Department of Transportation.

The fee is $36 for passenger vehicles.

A group of Democratic state legislators from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh wants to require Pennsylvania gun owners to do the same thing — at a yearly cost of $10 per gun.

The proposal is drawing swift opposition from gun owners.

"I can't imagine anybody coming up with something this absurd," said Joe Keffer, owner of The Sportsman Shop in New Holland.

State Rep. Angel Cruz of Philadelphia, the primary sponsor of House Bill 760, said his office has been flooded with phone calls, letters and e-mails since he introduced the legislation last week.

"One person who e-mailed called me a Nazi," Cruz said.

Despite the onslaught of opposition, Cruz said he is determined to push the bill forward.

"I'm not saying you can't have as many guns as you want," he said. "I just think the state should know where your guns are every year."

House Bill 760, co-sponsored by state Reps. Rosita Youngblood and Cherelle Parker, both of Philadelphia, state Reps. Jake Wheatley and Lisa Bennington, both of Allegheny County, and state Rep. Lawrence Curry of Montgomery and Philadelphia counties, requires the annual registration of all firearms, except antiques, with the state.

Registration would be done through the state police.

Every registration would have to be accompanied by two photographs of the person registering the gun, and those photos would have to be taken within the 30 days prior to the registration date.

Also, people registering guns would have their fingerprints taken by state police, which would keep all of the state's firearm registration information.

It would be illegal to own a gun and not have a registration certificate for it.

State police would have to be notified within 48 hours of the theft, destruction or loss of any registered firearm or its corresponding registration certificate.

The state police also would have to be notified within 48 hours of the sale of any firearm.

People with registered firearms would have to keep their guns "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock, gun safe or similar device unless the firearm is in the registrant's immediate possession and control while at the registrant's place of residence or business or while being used for lawful recreational purposes," according to the bill.

People working in law enforcement and security would be exempt from the last rule.

"I don't see our state legislators going along with this because they know they'll lose their seats," said Avery Lee, a manager at Trop Gun Shop in Elizabethtown.

Cruz said he doesn't understand why people should have to register their vehicles every year but not their guns.

His goal, he said, is to "find out how bad people are getting guns."

Too often, Cruz said, gun owners lose their firearms or have them stolen and never report the missing guns to authorities.

"With this bill, people would have to keep track of their guns and tell the state every year that they still have them or that they don't," he said.

Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray has made headlines recently for supporting various gun-control initiatives aimed at curbing gun violence, such as making it a crime not to report a lost or stolen gun.

But he said he believes House Bill 760 "seems to be more than is necessary."

"There ought to be more moderate measures we can take, I would think," he said.

State Rep. Samuel Rohrer of Berks County, Republican chairman of the House Game & Fisheries Committee, has started an online petition aimed at defeating gun control legislation, including House Bill 760.

"I've been hearing from many sportsmen and other Second Amendment rights advocates who are rightfully concerned about the deluge of gun-control bills being introduced in the Democrat-controlled state House," Rohrer states on his Web site, www.reprohrer.com.

"I am committed to defeating any proposal that further infringes on a law-abiding person's right to bear arms while doing nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals."

One of the problems Keffer has with House Bill 760 is the "size of the bureaucracy they would have to create to handle the registrations would be huge," he said. "There are so many guns out there."

E-mail: preilly@lnpnews.com