While I’m glad that the City has managed to reach a deal with two gun manufacturers over “ghost” guns, incidents like the shooting at the Philadelphia Masjid aren’t going to stop until preemption is no longer the law of the land in Pennsylvania.
During her First 100 Days event at the Russell Conwell Middle School in Kensington, Mayor Cherelle Parker announced that a settlement had been reached with two gun manufacturers — Polymer 80 and JSD Supply Inc. — regarding “ghost” guns.
For those of you who don’t know what a “ghost” gun is, it’s a firearm that you can get in a kit or in separate pieces. And while many of these components are plastic, they can shoot just as well as a regular gun once they’re put together.
Did I mention that these puppies are untraceable? No? Well, they are. And that’s why the City of Philadelphia and some of the counties near us sued Polymer 80 and JSD Supply Inc. for selling a whole lot of these things to folks who then used them to, well, shoot people. According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Polymer 80 was responsible for 88% of the “ghost” guns recovered by police across the nation by police from 2017 to 2021.
That’s a lot of plastic gun kits.
Now if you’ve been following gun laws in Pennsylvania, the fact that the city was even allowed to sue these companies over providing plastic gun components is more than a little significant.
That’s because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has traditionally sided with gun companies when the City of Philadelphia has tried to take them on. More than a few mayors, most recently former Mayor Jim Kenney, have tried to sue gun companies over their contributions to the problem of gun violence, only to have these lawsuits slapped down by the state because of preemption laws.
(Under preemption, the state doesn’t allow cities to regulate things that it feels it and it alone should be regulating. That’s why it took so long for Philadelphia to be able to sell medical marijuana.)
In fact, when you compare the gun laws of the states surrounding Pennsylvania — most notably New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Maryland — the Commonwealth’s gun laws have more holes in them than Swiss cheese.
So, the ghost gun settlement is pretty impressive. But while it’s impressive, it only puts but so much of a dent into the problem with gun violence that Philadelphia is still battling.
Especially when you consider that we have folks running around out here shooting up houses of worship with assault rifles.
In addition to being the day that we broadcast here on Hall Monitor, Wednesday also marked the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Because one of the hallmarks of Ramadan is 30 days of sunup, to sundown fasting, the final Eid-al-Fitr is marked with a big celebration.
The folks at the Philadelphia Masjid, a place I’ve been to a time or two, were having their Eid celebration on Wednesday when a bunch of folks with no obvious conflict resolution skills decided to start shooting the place up.
Police are still investigating, and while no one lost their lives in this madness, three people were shot, the Muslim community is still trying to make sense of it, and five people — four of them juveniles — have been arrested in connection with the shooting.
Now, there’s a lot that we have to talk about when we talk about gun violence. We have to talk about the part that poverty plays in it. We have to talk about the part that a lack of conflict resolution skills plays in it.
But despite what the folks at the National Rifle Association and significant parts of the Pennsylvania Legislature want to tell you, we also have to talk about the guns themselves. While you can kill someone with a “ghost” gun, you can kill a lot more people with an assault rifle because the capacity for bullets is higher.
So, while it’s important to get any guns coming into the city under control., we’re not going to completely solve this problem unless we get all of the guns under control.
And until we start plugging the holes in the Swiss cheese that is Pennsylvania’s gun laws, that’s not going to happen.
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