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Philadelphia asks court to let city make its own gun laws

The state General Assembly yesterday challenged Philadelphia's power to pass and enforce local gun-control laws, saying that violence in the city is really about drugs and not firearms.

The state General Assembly yesterday challenged Philadelphia's power to pass and enforce local gun-control laws, saying that violence in the city is really about drugs and not firearms.

City Council members Darrell Clarke and Donna Reed Miller sued the Legislature last fall for not passing laws authorizing the city to enforce local gun-control laws.

That amounts to a "state-created danger," Clarke and Miller contend.

But John Krill, an attorney for the state Senate, told a panel of five Commonwealth Court judges in the hearing yesterday that only the state can enact gun- control laws.

Krill said the root cause of the crime problem in the city was drugs.

"This is not an unfilled pothole or an unrepaired guardrail on a highway," Krill said. "The danger they are describing is created by criminals, not the state."

Jonathan Bloom, an attorney for the state House, said the claim of a state-created danger was used too broadly in the lawsuit.

"It just doesn't fit," Bloom said. "It applies to a specific person harmed by a specific state action."

The judges seemed skeptical about their role in the city-state turf battle. President Judge Bonnie Brigance Leadbetter asked if the court was "just a way station" in the lawsuit's inevitable route to the state Supreme Court.

The city is trying to provoke a reconsideration of that court's 1996 ruling that struck down local gun control in Philadelphia.

George Bochetto, the attorney for Clarke and Miller, told the judges they could be "extremely influential" in how the Supreme Court looks at the case.

"The real question is what does this court want to be?" Bochetto told the judges. "Does it want to be a way station or does it want to speak out and help the Supreme Court make the right decision on this matter?"

Yesterday's hearing focused on whether the lawsuit should go forward. The judges gave no timeline for when they would rule.

Philadelphia's gun-control laws would limit purchases of handguns to one a month, require owners to report lost or stolen guns to police, require a police-issued annual license to bring a gun into the city, allow police to confiscate guns from people considered a risk to themselves or others, ban semiautomatic weapons with clips that hold more than 10 rounds and establish a registry for ammunition sales.

Clarke resubmitted those proposals to Council in January, leaving out any mention of the need for matching state law.

Mayor Nutter, in a City Hall gun-control rally attended by about 100 people after yesterday's hearing, pledged to enforce those laws if Council passes them.

That, too, could prompt a Supreme Court review.

Nutter said the city's action would not impact the owners of legal guns but would help control straw purchases, where people allowed to buy guns sell them to people not allowed to have them.

And that's not just Philadelphia's problem, Nutter said. The same is going on in Reading, Allentown and Pittsburgh.

"Talk to folks in virtually any other municipality throughout this commonwealth," Nutter said. "They are having the same problems." *