PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Pennsylvania Superior Court has struck down a law requiring a permit to openly carry a gun on the street, dealing a blow to the city’s efforts to regulate guns more strictly than the rest of the state.
The ruling stems from the case of Riyaadh Sumpter, a West Philadelphia man arrested in 2022 after police saw a gun in his waistband. He did not have a permit and was sentenced to 12 months of probation for a firearms violation.
Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, but the law makes an exception for “Cities of the First Class,” Philadelphia being the only one of those. In the state, you need a permit to carry.
Sumpter’s public defender, Leonard Sosnov, argued the Philadelphia exception is unconstitutional.
“This discrimination against citizens of Philadelphia carrying a gun for self-defense, like everybody else in Pennsylvania, is a violation of Equal Protection rights,” Sosnov said. “That’s what I believed from reading the statutes, the United States Supreme Court decisions, and then it becomes a no-brainer. As a lawyer, your duty is to raise any issue on behalf of your client.”
Sosnov added, “People who are law-abiding and live in neighborhoods where there’s the most violence, they’re the people who need this right more than people who live in someplace where there’s no crime and there’s no need to carry a gun for self-defense.”
Sosnov lost the argument in Common Pleas Court but succeeded in Superior Court, where Judges Victor Stabile and Anne Lazarus ruled that carrying guns is a “fundamental right” guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Judge Tamika Lane, in her dissent, wrote that the law did not interfere with that right but simply required a permit, which Sumpter had not even sought.
It’s not clear whether police will immediately stop enforcing the permit requirement. The DA’s office said it would ask for a reconsideration of the ruling but declined further comment.