You Have to Be 21 to Buy a Bow and Arrow

You have to be 21 to buy a bow and arrow in Philadelphia.

Not 18. Not the federal long-gun age. Twenty-one. Same minimum age as a bottle of bourbon, a pack of cigarettes in PA, or a handgun under federal law. That’s what Philadelphia Code § 10-810(3)(b) says. The seller can’t sell — not without the minor’s parent signing for it in writing first. The penalty is the kind that ends a hobby shop.

The bow-and-arrow rule isn’t new. The expansion is. A pending 2025 bill would stretch the same age threshold to crossbows, blowguns, slingshots, and — I am not making this up — peashooters.

The peashooter is a tube you blow through. A dried pea comes out the other end. It is the weapon a third-grader brings to a sleepover. Under the bill, it would be regulated, in the Philadelphia Code, as a deadly weapon for sale to minors.

The spitball is a chewed-up piece of paper you load with spit and fire from a straw. If a kid is being fancy, the straw is a rolled-up piece of homework. Under the bill’s logic, I am not sure a spitball doesn’t qualify.

I understand how a bill ends up here. A staffer drafts a clean expansion: “bow and arrow, crossbow, blowgun, slingshot, and any other launched-projectile weapon.” Someone in committee objects that “launched projectile” is too broad. The staffer breaks it into named items. The list grows by one each round of markup. By the time it lands on the docket, you’d have peashooters in the statute.

The drafting isn’t wrong. Specificity is a virtue in penal statutes. The judge needs to know what counts and what doesn’t. “Other launched-projectile weapon” would be a defense attorney’s holiday: is a Nerf gun a launched-projectile weapon? Is a paper airplane? You don’t want that fight. So you name the things. You write the SKU list.

The result, though, would be a statute that treats archery like alcohol. The same threshold — 21 — that says you’re old enough to make a decision about a fifth of vodka would also say you’re old enough to make a decision about a longbow. A 19-year-old in college who shoots with the archery club would have to find someone over 21 to buy his arrows. That’s the law the bill would make.

Nobody is going to enforce this against a Boy Scout troop, and nobody is going to police the slingshot aisle at the surplus store. But if the bill passes, it would be on the books. The Code would then have a long list of sub-lethal projectile weapons restricted to adults, and the slippery slope from blowguns to peashooters would get slid in a single bill.

The Philadelphia Code is full of these anachronisms — I wrote about another one in the Fairmount Park Commission clause that still says the Commission is “hereby empowered” two hundred lines after the same Code says the Commission is “former.” The peashooter rule and the ghost Commission are the same kind of prose: words that were true once, in a different statute, that nobody quite deleted when they stopped being true.

Twenty-one. For a peashooter. That’s where this bill would take us.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

The current archery sales rule is Philadelphia Code § 10-810(3)(b), available in the American Legal Publishing code library. The 2025 expansion to crossbows, blowguns, slingshots, and peashooters is in Council Bill 250533, introduced May 15, 2025, and referred to the Committee on Public Safety. As of this writing, the bill is still in committee and has not been enacted. Comparison ages: 21 for alcohol in Pennsylvania, 21 for cigarettes (federal Tobacco 21 law), 21 for handguns under federal law (Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019). The penalty that ends a hobby shop is spelled out in § 10-810(7)(b): a seller who breaks § 10-810(3)(a) — the air-gun and spring-gun rule — has committed a Class III offense, owes the fines set by § 1-109(3), and can have the commercial activity license suspended for no less than six months and no more than one year. The bow-and-arrow rule in § 10-810(3)(b) does not carry that penalty on its face.