By the time three people were gunned down in mid-October at a North Side bus stop, Pittsburgh police had already spent the year cleansing the city of hundreds of firearms. Lost guns, stolen guns, crime guns — officers had been taking them all out of circulation at a rapid clip.
It wasn’t nearly fast enough.
Less than two weeks later, a shooting wounded five people outside a Brighton Heights church during a funeral service for one of the bus-stop victims.
Following arrests in the first case, an exasperated Mayor Ed Gainey appeared before news cameras at police headquarters to praise the force — and to vent about the relentless flow of firearms pulsing through his city.
“Thank you for getting 775 guns off our streets,” Gainey said before adding, “We’ve still got thousands more.”
Beyond the human toll, what most vexed the mayor was the stubborn existence of a deadly pipeline of guns.
“People are feeling frantic right now; they’re feeling scared,” Gainey said. “I’ll be quite frank. We don’t know where all these guns are coming from. We have no idea how young people are getting all these guns.”
He ended with a plea:
“But if someone out there does, let us know.”
Homicides increasing
Brazen shootings have punctuated the fall in Pittsburgh and in particular the North Side. Just last week, a lunchtime shooting Downtown grazed a woman, prompting a lockdown of the mayor’s office and City Council.
Murders in the city have soared this year. There were 65 killings through Nov. 17, all but five involving guns.
Pittsburgh hasn’t seen this many homicides since 2015, when there were 60 all year.
Gainey’s concern echoes that of politicians across the nation who are confronting gun violence and easy accessibility to firearms in their communities amid rising murders, surging gun sales and a social safety net frayed by the pandemic.
It’s a familiar refrain to investigators with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Robert Cucinotta, an ATF spokesman in Philadelphia and a longtime field agent, is intimately familiar with how firearms get diverted to the streets through loss, theft and fraudulent purchases. He also has witnessed the surge in privately made firearms, which have largely avoided regulation until recently.
“Anytime a shooting occurs with numerous victims, like that of Oct. 28 in Pittsburgh, the first questions of the citizens and elected officials will always be: ‘Where are these guns coming from?’ and ‘How are these guys getting their hands on the guns?’ ” Cucinotta said.
LaRonda Averytt, whose mother, Betty Jean, was killed at the bus stop near the high-rise where she lived, lamented how easy it is to get a gun.
“It’s like going to the candy store,” she said.
Averytt said her 59-year-old mother tried to play it safe, avoiding roller coasters, fast drivers and tattoos — and venturing out late.
“She knew how dangerous the streets were,” Averytt said.
But the woman, who had raised six girls and was known to friends and family as Beautiful Brown Betty, put her fears aside Oct. 15 and, according to her daughter, walked a younger woman to the bus stop around 10 p.m.
When a fight broke out at a nearby gas station and turned into gunfire, bystanders Betty Jean Averytt and Jacquelyn Mehalic, 33, were killed along with John Hornezes Jr., 20, who police said was involved in the argument.
Averytt liked dancing, house painting, playing cards and dyeing her hair. Her daughter made sure her mother’s locks were colored the same blue at her funeral as on the last day of her life.
Police charged three men, ages 19, 21 and 30, in connection with the deaths. Then on Oct. 28, at Hornezes’ funeral, shooters opened fire outside Destiny of Faith church. Again, innocents were wounded. And arrests were swift. Police charged two teens — ages 16 and 19. Especially troubling to the mayor: guns ending up in the hands of young people.
‘Easy’ to get guns
The Rev. Eileen Smith, who spearheads anti-violence work as the executive director of the South Pittsburgh Coalition for Peace, said the gun violence is the worst she has seen.
Despite policing and intervention by streetwise outreach workers, there is no letup in the supply of firearms.
Pittsburgh police have recovered 786 guns so far this year. During each of the previous two years, officers took 942 guns out of circulation.
“The kids have access to them. They don’t care who they sell them to out there,” Smith said. “It’s nothing new. It’s just been escalated.”
Pittsburgh is hardly alone. Philadelphia also has grappled with a deadly 2022 — more than 2,000 shooting victims, nearly a quarter of whom died. Last year, according to Cucinotta, Philadelphia police seized roughly 5,900 guns. This year, he said, the count stands at 6,400 — and climbing.
Nationally, the Justice Department has prioritized battling violent crime and targeting those responsible for putting firearms into the hands of killers, stick-up artists and other criminals. Last year, it launched a comprehensive strategy to address gun violence.
“We are cracking down on the criminal gun-trafficking pipelines that flood our communities with illegal (guns),” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a June speech in Texas while announcing charges against a man for illegal firearms dealing. Garland said the guns that he sold wound up in several Texas cities as well as Baltimore and Canada.
Despite the outrage of Gainey — whose own sister was shot dead in 2016 in the East End — the ugly truth is this: Gun violence remains entrenched no matter how many police officers and policies are thrown at the problem.
“This has been going on for decades. In this city, it’s the worst it’s ever been,” Smith said. “But it’s not hopeless.”
To gun-control advocates, the problem boils down to the number of guns in civilian hands. One widely cited statistic estimates there are more than 393 million firearms in the U.S. Allison Anderman, senior counsel and local policy director for the anti-gun-violence group Giffords, said the level of gun violence in the country is far greater than that in “peer nations.”
“We have astronomically more gun violence,” Anderman said. “The reason is obvious to anyone except zealous gun advocates: It’s the guns.”
In Pittsburgh, as in many other cities, guns have been used in shocking ways. Gainey was particularly appalled by the mid-afternoon Brighton Heights shooting. In an interview on WESA-FM, he said he was disturbed to see Black people bringing violence to the doorstep of an African American church, a cornerstone of the Black community.
Smith supports Gainey’s efforts to marry policing and prevention through community outreach, code enforcement and a public health approach to gun violence. But, she said, more money and a dedicated funding stream is critical.
“What’s being done now is OK,” Smith said, “but it’s not making an impact.”
Gainey did not respond to multiple requests for an interview over the past two weeks.
Josh Fleitman, Western Pennsylvania’s manager for the gun-control group CeaseFirePA, has witnessed the cycle of destruction wrought by guns.
“What we’re seeing now is an exclamation point on the long run-on sentence of gun violence,” Fleitman said.
Into the wrong hands
Although the mayor seemed baffled by the unceasing tide of guns, his police brass, along with researchers and public interest groups across the country, have pinpointed the typical ways firearms fall into the wrong hands.
“Largely, we do know where a lot of these guns are coming from,” Fleitman said. “The missing piece is what to do about it.”
Guns often make their way into the shadows through theft or loss. Another way is through so-called “straw purchases,” in which someone with a clean record illegally buys a gun for someone else, often a person barred from owning a firearm. Sometimes, unscrupulous gun dealers willing to look the other way are involved in the transaction.
Last year, a law enforcement coalition focused on how firearms were getting into juveniles’ hands, driven by what it said seemed to be a prevalence of young people committing gun crimes. The ATF shared the findings during a news conference.
Almost half of the recovered weapons were reported stolen, the ATF reported; nearly 1 in 5 was bought illegally.
Juveniles potentially face less severe consequences than adults for having guns. That emboldens them — and makes them attractive pawns for criminals seeking to stash firearms, according to the ATF’s Cucinotta.
“These under-21-year-olds are frequently doing the labor for a lot of the drug dealers,” Cucinotta said.
Pittsburgh’s experience is mirrored nationally, according to the gun-violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety.
“Gun thefts often divert guns into an underground market where people with dangerous histories are easily able to obtain firearms without restriction,” according to Everytown.
Making things worse, the group warned: Most states, including Pennsylvania, don’t require reporting lost or stolen guns to police — unlike the surrounding states of New Jersey, New York and Ohio.
Russell Cain, a detective in Pittsburgh’s firearms tracking unit, lambasted irresponsible gun owners for contributing to the problem.
When someone reports a stolen gun, Cain said, it’s not unusual for the owner to lack paperwork and a record of the weapon’s serial number.
“They pretty much know nothing about the firearm,” Cain said during a news conference over the summer. “In our opinion, that’s not responsible gun ownership.”
More troubling to Cain are some of the careless ways lost and stolen guns reach the underground marketplace. Cain recounted stories of someone sticking a gun in a tree while heading to a bar for drinks; people stowing guns under bushes while on the way to work; and careless owners leaving guns in unlocked cars with the windows down — in high-crime areas.
“These,” Cain said, “are where these guns are coming from.”
Kim Stolfer, who leads a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting Pennsylvanians’ Second Amendment rights, agreed with Cain that some gun owners act irresponsibly, but he said they represent a tiny minority.
“Ninety-five percent of them, if not more, report in a very responsible manner,” said Stolfer, president of Firearm Owners Against Crime-Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action.
Stolfer of South Fayette said he believes Gainey and anti-gun groups are misguided. Efforts to curb gun violence should focus on enforcing laws against criminals, he said. He also disagreed with law enforcement theories about the source of crime guns.
“The proliferation of guns has no bearing whatsoever on the crimes being committed with them,” Stolfer said. “It’s complete poppycock to say that all the crimes are being committed with lost or stolen guns, ghost guns or straw purchases. … They’re coming from friends and family. They’re coming from out of state.”
A wave of gun purchases during the past several years and what Fleitman called “societal unbalance” sparked by the pandemic have provided the backdrop to the current crush of gunplay.
In 2021, more than 1 million guns were bought or privately sold in Pennsylvania, down from the year before. But 2020 represented a monster showing for gun sales, which topped 1.1 million, soaring by 49% over the previous year, according to Pennsylvania State Police.
While gun sales dropped last year, permits to carry concealed weapons jumped by more than 23%, with more than 384,000 licenses issued by Philadelphia and sheriff’s departments across the commonwealth.
Ghost guns on the rise
Another factor driving gun violence: the rise of “ghost guns,” or unregulated home-built firearms made from kits that can be bought online.
Also known as “privately made firearms,” ghost guns have proliferated across the country. Seizures nationally by law enforcement rocketed by 1,000% between 2016 and 2021, according to the ATF.
In Pittsburgh, police have seized 38 ghost guns so far this year. In 2021, they confiscated about 50 — nearly five times the amount a year earlier.
The ATF pointed to several factors driving the growth: the internet, which functions as a marketplace and source of gun-manufacturing know-how, and advances in technology, such as 3D printing.
Lacking serial numbers, these weapons — just as deadly as any store-bought firearm — are untraceable.
Last month, Pittsburgh police stumbled across a cache of what appeared to be parts for such weapons inside a car parked on the North Side.
Among the contraband seized: an AR-15 rifle; parts to make more AR-15s and handguns; miscellaneous gun parts and tools; and a piece to convert a firearm into a fully automatic machine gun. Police arrested the driver, who awaits a preliminary hearing.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration issued new rules to crack down on ghost guns by forcing makers and sellers of the most accessible types of homemade firearms to become licensed, inscribe serial numbers and run background checks on potential buyers.
The main target of the rule: what law enforcement calls “buy build shoot” kits that can be purchased online without a background check and assembled at home into a working gun in 30 minutes.
‘Home-grown’ problem
Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s top law enforcer, also has cracked down on illegal guns during his tenure, netting accolades from Brady, the national anti-gun-violence group.
Shapiro made public a raft of data tracing the origin of “crime guns” in Pennsylvania — 186,000 guns in all from more than 150 law enforcement agencies. These firearms were used in crimes, recovered from crime scenes or stolen.
Brady hailed it as the “most important gun trace dataset to be publicly available in decades” and said it showed “which gun dealers appear to supply the most guns to the illegal market.”
Almost two-thirds of the crime guns recovered in Pittsburgh came from in-state dealers — what Brady called a “home-grown” problem. The group identified 11 dealers in the Greater Pittsburgh area whose names cropped up at least 200 times when crime guns recovered in the city were traced to their points of origin. Of those, at least five are closed.
Like Pittsburgh’s mayor, Shapiro finds himself frustrated by certain aspects of the war against illegal guns. Not all law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania are taking advantage of the national eTrace system run by the ATF.
The system tracks crime guns to their original owner, a critical cog in any investigation into how a weapon used in illegal activity found its way into criminal hands.
But nearly half of the commonwealth’s law enforcement agencies don’t use the system, and only slightly more than 1 in 10 share data, according to Shapiro’s office.
Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, as in Philadelphia, the mayor’s office continues to wage an uphill slog in the courts over efforts to enact stiff gun-control measures within city limits, a labor that began after the 2018 Tree of Life shooting at a synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
The next year, City Council passed three gun-control ordinances, including one that barred the use of large-capacity magazines and assault weapons in public places.
But a group called Firearms Owners Against Crime sued the city, successfully arguing that state law prevented local governments from adopting such restrictions. Pittsburgh has petitioned the state Supreme Court to hear the case.
Similarly, an appellate court blocked a Philadelphia ordinance requiring gun owners to tell police when a gun has been lost or stolen.
That doesn’t sit well with gun-control advocates.
“The least we can do is take the handcuffs off local lawmakers,” Everytown’s Fleitman said. “I definitely understand the mayor’s frustration because the tools at a municipal government’s disposal are pretty slim and in many ways intentionally limited by the state.’
Jonathan D. Silver is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jonathan at jsilver@triblive.com.
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