City shouldn’t have to sue for gun safety

With nearly three months remaining in 2020, six murders Monday in Philadelphia pushed this year’s homicide total, 366, beyond the 2019 total. Almost all of those victims were shot. Almost all of those victims also were or are Pennsylvanians. Yet the state Legislature continues to refuse to help Philadelphia protect the city’s streets.

The carnage is, as Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw called it: “shameful and sickening.” And there is no single cause of it that easily can be corrected. That does not mean, however, that the government should not address known elements of the problem. One of those is that guns are the weapons of choice for killers.

Philadelphia has been trying for decades to get the state Legislature to help diminish gun violence. But conservative legislative majorities consistently have served the cause of gun rights absolutism rather than citizens’ safety.

Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and more than 20 other local governments adopted ordinances nearly a decade ago, for example, limiting gun purchases to one per month per person and requiring the reporting to police of lost or stolen weapons — neither of which infringed upon legitimate gun ownership and both of which were designed to prevent the distribution of deadly firearms to criminals. Courts upheld the ordinances, finding that gun activists who sued against them lacked standing because they could demonstrate no harm.

The state Legislature shamefully responded with a law that grants such standing and requires the local governments to pay the legal bills of activists who sue against the ordinances.

Now, Philadelphia has sued the state government in Commonwealth Court, seeking to overturn its preemption of local gun ordinances.

Philadelphia wants to prevent “straw purchases” that put guns in criminals’ hands, preclude carrying firearms in public parks and a few other measures that could deny at least some bad actors the means to increase the death toll.

It is to the shame of lawmakers that the city has to sue. Every local government in Pennsylvania that cares about their citizens’ safety should support Philadelphia’s lawsuit.

When ‘temporary’ lasts

It took some doing but the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has found the sweet spot in balancing the competing interests of pay-as-you-go protocols versus the real-time, real-life struggles of those ensnared in the economic fallout of COVID-19.

After a few months of deadlock, the PUC settled on a decision in early October: End the across-the-board moratorium on utility shutoff but create a protected class of customers at or below 300% of federal poverty guidelines, so long as those customers avail themselves of other assistance programs available to them.

The pending Nov. 9 end to the broad moratorium had to happen at some point. Otherwise, the PUC would have set the utility companies up for their own set of financial problems and could have been potentially complicit to customers’ racking up of a mountain of debt that could have proved, in time, to be insurmountable.

When the moratorium on utility shutoffs was put in place in mid-March, fingers were crossed that the brunt of COVID-19 would be in the rearview mirror within a season. Then came summer without its fireworks, then September without full-on faceto-face education. The holidays portend to be quieter and “new normal” seems likely to be the watchwords for 2021.

So the “temporary” measures that were put in place — such as the ban of utility shutoffs — must be re-evaluated through this now clearer lens: The collateral damage of the pandemic in economic terms will unfold for months or years to come. Temporary layoffs have become permanent. Supposed stopgap furloughs remain in place.

In the meantime, citizens must do the responsible thing and manage within their means. Spending adjustments, if needed, should be made. This is reasonable.

Nonetheless, the reasonable thing may not be possible, at least not immediately, for some.

Spending adjustments in the midst of this pandemic could mean “adjusting” to a hungry belly or a cold nose. That’s why the PUC’s creation of the protected class is both compassionate and sensible. Yet even that reprieve will have to come to an end at some point.

It was time for a reckoning with “temporary.” The PUC was wise to see this.