People who buy guns for people who cannot obtain them legally are known as “straw purchasers,” a benign label for a deadly problem.

It’s particularly severe in Philadelphia, where more than 500 people were murdered in 2022. Recently, The Philadelphia Inquirer examined 135 cases over the past three years in which people were charged with gun trafficking.

It found an array of motivations for straw purchases. About a third of the defendants were women who bought guns at the behest of husbands or boyfriends. Many buyers were in their early 20s and bought handguns for others younger than 21 — driving the massive problem of armed teenagers. Some others in effect operated businesses buying numerous guns for sale to ineligible people.

Though the cases entailed hundreds of guns, police and prosecutors told The Inquirer that those who were caught are rare exceptions, and that thousands of guns are on the street through straw purchases.

Anti-trafficking laws clearly are inadequate to the task. For years, police agencies and city officials across Pennsylvania have asked the Legislature to pass laws or enable local ordinances to limit gun sales to one per month per person, and to require gun owners to report when their weapons are lost or stolen. Doing so would diminish volume straw purchases and deter people from selling their weapons and claiming later, when the weapons are recovered at crime scenes, that they were lost or stolen.

Lawmakers should burn the straw man business model by making it more difficult for them to arm killers.

— The Citizens’ Voice/ TNS