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Gun Crisis on Display in Philadelphia

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

May 3, 2006 -- Fifteen-hundred guns put on display in the formal reception room at Philadelphia City Hall. If you guessed that these guns were used in crimes, you'd be right. Lawmen want to add one more gun to the collection.

The instruments of destruction that have been stealing the soul of this city were brought to the very heart of City Hall for all to see. And what a sobering sight it was. Hoping to trigger an intense political argument for tougher gun laws in unison with other cities, the city put on a dramatic display of what this is all about.

If you thought they had a weapons problem in Iraq, the city wants you to look at what's going on in Philadelphia. There are 1500 weapons that were confiscated by Philadelphia police since January. And we're not even half way through the year yet. Councilman Darrell Clarke(D)Philadelphia: "It is clear that we have found the weapons of mass destruction. They are here and unfortunately they are on the streets of the city of Philadelphia." There the weapons laid in sharp contrast to the ornate City Hall reception room. Assault weapons, street sweepers, the ones with boxes next to them are guns that have been linked to homicides. Sylvester Johnson/Phila. Police Commissioner: "And these are the weapons that the police come in contact every single day." It was Mayor Street's idea to display these weapons in such fashion to dramatize the severity of the problem. Mayor John Street/(D) Philadelphia: "The proliferation of guns is completely and totally out of control." Only last week in New York, Mayor Street joined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and 13 other mayors from across the country to target illegal guns and violence in American cities. They also plan to target efforts in congress to limit cities' right to access and use gun tracing data, a valuable tool for law enforcement. Street: "We're not gonna relent until we have better cooperation out of our state government and federal government." Philadelphia officials concede it is a longtime political argument that has gone nowhere because the city does not have the power to legislate gun control, only the state legislature and congress can. Those bodies have been pressured intensely by a gun lobby that spent 280 million dollars last year alone to fight tougher gun laws. A lobby that argues that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Street: "People are a huge part of the problem." That much, Mayor Street and others concede. But they point out the other part of the problem is the easy availability of guns to people who in years past would have settled their differences with a fist fight or other non-lethal ways. Gene Blagmond/Philadelphia FOP/Lodge # 5: "We had 30 thousand Americans killed by guns last year. That's a problem and if we don't do something about it, it's gonna happen again this year." That is the problem, that is the message, and those are the solutions being offered by Mayor Street and others to help address what is happening in Philadelphia and other cities like it. Clearly, it will be a serious uphill battle, but Mayor Street points out, so was the battle to permit gaming in Pennsylvania, something that some also thought would never happen.

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