Editorial: Mayors take aim on illegal guns

Win or lose, the constitutional challenges to local gun laws in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other Pennsylvania communities appear to be helping build grassroots pressure on Harrisburg lawmakers to follow New Jersey's lead and enact tougher statewide gun-control measures.

Even as the latest court ruling dealt a blow to Philadelphia's 2008 gun laws, Lancaster became the eighth town to enact its own requirement that owners must report lost or stolen weapons.

In addition to Philadelphia, officials in Pittsburgh, Allentown, Reading, Easton, Pottsville, and Wilkinsburg have adopted such ordinances in hopes of forcing the hand of lawmakers who toe the National Rifle Association line.

Those may be baby steps compared with Jersey lawmakers' final approval Friday of a monthly handgun purchase limit. But Pennsylvania's laws are an outgrowth of a smart push by the national group Mayors Against Illegal Guns and gun-control advocates to move the issue.

Nearly 100 mayors across the state have signed on to support legislation to stem illegal gun sales. The mandate to report missing guns is a tactic to expose traffickers who use networks of legal buyers to acquire weapons.

Mayors, including Philadelphia's Michael Nutter, are the ones who have to live with the carnage due to the easy availability of handguns in so many communities. As Reading Mayor Thomas McMahon told an Inquirer reporter recently, their view on gun deaths is "enough is enough."

With that much resolve from a growing number of local officials, it almost doesn't matter that the court challenges from the National Rifle Association pose an uphill battle for these laws.

A 1996 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted the General Assembly the exclusive right to regulate firearms. It was no surprise, then, that Commonwealth Court upheld a lower-court ruling that struck down a city ban on assault weapons and one-gun-a-month purchase limits.

As it happened, the city did come away with something: The court left untouched the city's lost-and-stolen reporting requirement, its restrictions on gun ownership by people under domestic-abuse court orders, and its right to seize weapons when someone is regarded as a threat. That's for now, since the case likely is headed to the state Supreme Court.

But the important thing is that the yearlong legal challenges haven't dampened enthusiasm for gun-control measures. In fact, the opposite has occurred. That's a drumbeat for reform that state lawmakers can't ignore forever.