Officers are taking every arm they can find, musket or rifle. The quotas issued in May 1775 to each county for making new muskets fail--few counties produce enough, some produce none, and almost none produce them quickly enough. So in early spring 1776 the orders go out to disarm all non-associators, not because they are thought to be dangerous but because they have lots of arms that are sitting idle. Things become really desperate as PA militia need to leave for deployments in New Jersey and New York in August 1776.
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of receipts in RG27 documenting this process. Some just record the purchase (the nonassociator was supposed to be compensated for the arms that were taken) of a single weapon, others are returns of hundreds of weapons. The Oerter rifle is an example where two rifles are confiscated. The return below lists both muskets with bayonets and rifles (232 rifles in all, I think).
BTW, since confiscated arms often needed repair before they could be used--unlike, presumably, newly produced arms--this process kept the gunsmiths extremely busy with repair work (all documented, too, since they wanted to get paid!).
