DA targets legit gun owners by enforcing law on lost and stolen guns | Stu Bykofsky

DA Larry Krasner has found a class of potential criminals he’s hot to pursue: legal gun owners.

He’s used CPR to revive a passed-but-unenforced city ordinance that has been comatose for a decade.

While taking a swipe at the NRA, past Philadelphia DAs, the federal government, the state legislature, and the state attorney general, Krasner said enforcing a law that gun owners must report lost or stolen weapons “does not regulate guns.”

The goal: Reduce gun crime in a city wracked by gun violence.

The method: Criminalize legal gun owners who fail to report within 24 hours that a firearm has been lost or stolen.

The principle: Reduce what are called straw purchases, buying a firearm for someone prohibited from owning one.

The benefit to gun owners: If a gun used in a crime is traced back to the original owner who has reported it stolen, that person is pretty much in the clear. But if the gun was not reported, the owner gets written up.

But the law has flaws. Gun owners may not know that a firearm was lost or stolen, and the fine is too high — as high as $2,000 for a first-time offender, with future offenses possibly bringing 90 days in jail.

Then there’s the question of whether the law will pass constitutional muster.

Former DA Lynne Abraham says it will not.

The state has preempted gun laws, she tells me, and should someone be arrested for failure to report, “the NRA will say they will defend you in court.” Municipal gun laws have been tried and failed in the past. The state has supremacy because insanity would reign if each of Pennsylvania’s local governments wrote its own gun codes.

While she favors gun-control legislation, she wonders why Krasner (they hold each other in contempt) is “prosecuting the guy who loses his grandfather’s gun instead of the guy who shoots someone on the street,” referencing Thursday night’s double homicide in which about 25 shots were fired.

Abraham is a gun owner who currently packs a Walther PPK 9mm semiautomatic.

Pro-gun lawyer Jon Mirowitz says the enforcement is a Krasner “publicity stunt.” He disagrees with a criminal sanction, asking, “If my car gets stolen do I have to report it?”

I have a huge problem with the huge fine.

Anyone can be the victim of theft, or even (really stupid) carelessness with a gun.

Once.

A gun might be stolen without the owner being aware of it. If it is used in a crime and is traced back to the owner, should he or she be prosecuted? What about the presumption of innocence?

Krasner says, with justification, that some gun owners are bad people who will lie about the gun being stolen. They are traffickers. He’s right, but I say your first lost or stolen gun is free.

Your second, that’s going to be a fine and maybe jail time. Your third offense? That should be a felony, which will bar you from gun ownership.

Let’s return to the starting point — going after straw purchasers.

Pennsylvania has a mandatory five-year minimum for trafficking in guns.

When she was DA, says Abraham, the typical straw purchaser in Philadelphia was a girlfriend of a man prohibited from gun ownership. The women were frequently mothers, and judges would look for ways to keep them out of jail. The word goes out to the street: Women don’t get jail time.

If you are serious about reducing straw sales, you’ve got to lock them up.

Five years.

That will do more to reduce straw sales than criminalizing first-offense legit gun owners.