Change the venue

The city’s gun-control fight is in Harrisburg

It’s not a crime to think about committing a crime.

That’s why it’s too soon to pull the trigger on filing private criminal complaints against members of Pittsburgh City Council who are in favor of passing local gun restrictions.

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. has made it clear that city council and Mayor Bill Peduto have no legal foundation on which to build a municipal ordinance that restricts gun possession within the city. But the district attorney — the top prosecutor in the county

— also has made it clear that gun-rights activists who have moved to file private complaints against the mayor and his gun-control supporters likewise are without a legal foundation on which to build such criminal charges.

The DA is right on both counts. It’s time to press the pause button. Both sides on this issue are pouring energy and time into strategems that can’t accomplish anything beyond public tumult, sound and fury.

Already, there is more than enough fury — and frustration and pain. Hardly a day passes without an account of death-by-bullets. The grief at the loss, the frustration at seeing it coming yet being unable to stop it, has been too much for too long. Then came the Tree of Life massacre.

City officials now are channeling their grief and frustration into go-nowhere gun control. Their opponents are channeling their anger into intimidating the city officials with threats to entangle them in a personal legal morass.

Neither strategy is supported by the law.

Neither strategy amounts to more than sound and fury.

It is time to channel the sound and fury into productivity.

If city officials want change in gun regulations, they should engage with their counterparts across the state; spark a conversation in borough halls and township supervisor chambers throughout the region. Discussion alone would create a groundswell that would be felt on the floor of the state capitol building where legislators have the power and the responsibility to determine gun control — how much, what type, whether any at all.

If the mayor and city council move forward to enact local gun control measures, they do so at the peril of facing criminal charges for what would amount to civil disobedience.

But, to date, there has been no disobedience. There has been impassioned discussion. That’s not a crime.