DN Editorial: City gun court shutting down

Posted: September 29, 2011

WE ALL should be disturbed at the news that a special gun court is shutting down because of budget cuts, especially coming, as it does, during a week in which four people were shot in one night, including a 2-year-old.

Created in 2005 to try to reduce violence from illegal gun possessions, the gun court, within Common Pleas Court, was designed to provide more heavily supervised probation and education for offenders. The creation of the court followed the shooting death of 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs, and was jointly announced by then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham, the U.S. Attorney's Office, then-Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, and state Rep. Dwight Evans.

It's unknown how effective this court was in getting illegal guns and their owners off the street - and that suggests the court was not as effective as it should have been in monitoring its own progress and impact. Police stats tell a mixed story: In general, homicides have declined since 2007. The number of shooting victims from those years don't follow a single trajectory, though year-to-date comparisons for the first six months of 2010 versus 2011 shows a 12 percent decline in shooting victims.

The good news is that the current district attorney, Seth Williams, and his office have established a geographic prosecution strategy with six locations throughout the city. Gun cases will now be handled within this system, and a clearer picture of gun problems may emerge.

Still, we wish that when Gov. Corbett was increasing prison and probation money in his first budget, he was more up-front about the fact that some of that extra funding was coming at the expense of Philadelphia's attempts to deal with the scourge of too many illegal guns. To us, that move was a cheap shot.

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