Southeastern PA ADAer testifies on handguns

Statement of Harold Rosenthal before the House Judiciary Committee, Conducted at CORA in Northeast Philadelphia, February 16, 2007.

Welcome Chairman Caltigerone, Chairman Evans and members of the Judiciary Committee and to all who braved 13 degree weather to come to a corner of cool Northeast Philadelphia this morning.

I mean cool in two ways. Besides the weather, Northeast Philadelphia is a significant part of Philadelphia with a history older than the City. It is as large and sufficiently diverse to be a city unto itself. If it were it would be larger then Pittsburgh.

Because of the weather I wore my pea jacket from my Navy career. It is warm and it is 51 years old. I am older than that.

I grew up in a neighborhood where the common thread was frustration. Our parents were poor. They drank and they fought. The schools were over studented and under staffed. There was no place to play. Most of us kids were going no where and we knew it.

Our frustration and lack of any thing worth while to do led to gangs and violence. I was the runner for my gang. My job was to go onto streets where I did not belong. Get chased. And if I was fast enough lead the enemy to where my guys were waiting.

We fought and wrestled. We fought with our fists and sometimes with brass knuckles and knives. We did not have guns. -Probably because we did not know where to get them.

Today kids growing up in similar neighborhoods –we call these neighborhoods ghettoes or just hoods – are just as frustrated by the same conditions that caused the violence in us. Today they don’t use just fists or brass knuckles or knives. Today they use handguns because they are so easy to obtain. But handgun violence is not limited to the ghettoes.

My wife Sue taught at the Public High School for Creative and Performing Arts. It is a Philadelphia magnet school with a student population coming from all over the City and as diverse as the City. Sue would ask her classes, “How many know where to buy a handgun?” Every hand would shoot up.

There is no neighborhood where a kid does not know where to be an illegal handgun. This is just not in Philadelphia. It is occurring in Reading where I attended its Mayor’s conference against violence last week. Several mayors including the chair of our State Mayors’ Committee were there also to voice their concerns.

Handgun violence is also occurring in the Lancasters and Pottstowns, in large and small cites and in urban and suburban communities. The ease in which we can buy an illegal handgun is a growing disease in this country. The student caused school murders we read about more often these days are occurring in rural communities by kids loaded with guns.

Where do these guns come from? –Some from their parents who fail to secure them. But many are street purchased from the trunk of a car.

How does this happen? Handguns are initially purchased legitimately by some people by the dozens who then sell them to kids and others who could not legally buy a handgun.

It is that legal wholesale purchase of handguns that puts these weapons into the hands of those who have no right under our laws and because of their frustration and violence should not posses a killing weapon.

Last March Sue and I organized volunteers who went into the district of the then Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. In two hours we obtained the signatures of 2,039 constituents to a petition demanding hearings for the passage of two bills – a bill to limit the purchase of handguns to one every 30 days and a bill to require the reporting of lost or stolen weapons.

I was approached by a member of the NRA who demanded to know, as he misunderstood, why I was opposed to handguns. When I explained I was not. I was only opposed to the illegal handgun market which is fed by being able to legitimately buy enough handguns to go into business. My NRA member asked why anyone would want to buy even 12 handguns a year. He not only signed my petition but went home and brought his wife and two NRA friends who also signed our petition to help stop the illegal handgun market.

Members of the Committee, it is handguns to which we must have tighter controls throughout our State. There are legitimate rights to certain weapons. Hunting in our State is a right that goes back before our Constitution and its Second Amendment. But handguns are seldom used for hunting.

They are the weapons of choice easily obtained by an ever increasing violent society in many parts of our State.

We must do something to cure that violence. Yet there is no magic one step cure all.

We must also remove from our entire State the ability to arm that violence with a killing weapon. We must end the illegal handgun market by limiting the legal sale of handguns to an individual to one handgun every 30 days throughout our State and to require a lost or stolen weapon to be reported.

Thank you for you concern and attention.

Harold Rosenthal
Philadelphia, PA