The City of Pittsburgh joined Philadelphia and several other municipalities and state legislators in a lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania over a law that would give gun-rights groups like the NRA standing to sue over gun laws. The move seems a little strange since the city has doesn’t anything to enforce its own gun laws since they were approved more than six years ago.
In many cases the local gun law in question is referred to as a lost and stolen ordinance. The law basically requires gun owners to file a police report when a firearm is, as the law states, lost and stolen. The purpose of the law is to curtail straw purchases — a legal buyer gets the gun and then sells it to someone who can’t legally purchase a firearm or want their name attached to the sale.
Pittsburgh enacted its law to much fanfare in 2008 (it took effect in 2009) and the NRA sued to have it wiped off the books. The problem is, the court ruled, is that the group didn’t have standing to challenge the law. The law would have to be enforced and then the target of the enforcement could challenge the law’s constitutionality.
The problem is, the law in Pittsburgh has never been enforced. In 2010, a year after the measure became law, I wrote a piece about how the law had never been enforced and quite possibly never would be. The city police and the administration of former Mayor Luke Ravenstahl pointed fingers at each other as to why the law had not been enforced. The bill languished.
But then during last year’s mayoral election, the bill got a lot of play with Bill Peduto pledging to enforce the law. “My first order of business as Mayor will be to fully implement the Lost and Stolen Handguns legislation I authored and passed through Council,” Peduto wrote in a questionnaire seeking the endorsement of the Pittsburgh Black Political Convention.
But to this day, the law has still not been enforced. In May — four months after taking office — Peduto told City Paper’s Rebecca Nuttall that he was likely not going to enforce it. “If we try it, we’ll be sued, and under present state law, we will probably lose,” Peduto said at the time.
That was an about face from comments he made during a January 2013 debate: “If we as a city were to be sued by the NRA for enforcing the lost-and-stolen handgun [law], I’d welcome that lawsuit. Because if it saved one life, it’s worth the dollars of hiring a few lawyers in order to fight it.”
And now Pittsburgh is involved in a lawsuit to stop challenges to a law that it may never enforce. In a statement, reported by the Post-Gazette and others Peduto said the lawsuit was necessary not only because the legislation was unconstitutional but also because the law was “designed to bully cities like Pittsburgh trying to stop the flow of illegal guns into their neighborhoods. Pittsburgh will not be bullied. We won’t stand idly by when the gun lobby is given special rights over citizens seeing blood running in their streets.”
Exactly. When we stand idly by, apparently, we insist on doing it on our own terms.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2014.
The lawsuit against the standing law is Shakepeare’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
To begin with, political subdivisions–counties, cities, boroughs, townships–cannot have their own gun laws. They try to do so, from time to time, to mask their own failure to carry out the principal duty of government, which is to maintain law and order.
They pass trivial, nugatory ordinances, such as the one discussed above, as a kind of theater. These are not really enforced, only threatened. They are not challenged in the courts, because it is not practical to do so. Who is going to litigate what is for all effects like a big traffic ticket, only without the points on one’s license?
When NGO’s try to do so on behalf of their members, those cases are dismissed for a legal technicality, “standing” meaning that the NGO’s are not proper parties to the suit.
So it was that the people of the Commonwealth, through the legislature, passed a statute to clarify that the NGO’s had standing to challenge the invalid ordinances.
So what do the rogue municipalities do? But of course: to preserve their one legal technicality, standing, they put forth another, the single purpose rule.
Ho-hum. As your mayor recognizes, if and when Pittsburgh ever tries to enforce its faux ordinance, the case is getting thrown out on appeal. All the NRA or the state affiliate have to do is to wait for the right case and finance the litigation costs for the real party in interest.
Like so much of the squabbling in the gun culture war, this has been meaningless posturing.