Pennsylvania’s gun laws need fixing.

No, they’re not “too lax,” and they don’t allow violent criminals to easily buy guns through legitimate channels, as many gun control activists wrongly claim.

Rather, the state’s gun laws allow for gross injustices against peaceable gun owners—injustices that undermine public safety, rather than promote it.

Just ask Vincent Yakaitis.

In February 2023, Yakaitis—then 73 years old—shot and wounded a much younger intruder who charged at him while burglarizing his Port Carbon property. By all accounts, this was a justified use of deadly force by a crime victim against a criminal actor, who now faces a litany of criminal charges.

Yet, more than a year after Yakaitis used his firearm in self-defense, prosecutors decided to pursue criminal charges against him as well—not for shooting the burglar, but for carrying a firearm in public without a license.

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The two first-degree misdemeanor charges he faces are no laughing matter, either. Each count carries a potential sentence of up to five years in prison, meaning a conviction would also disqualify him under federal law from ever possessing firearms in the future.

But wait. Why did Yakaitis need a license to carry a firearm on his own property?

It appears that while Yakaitis owned the vacant building in which he defended himself, he didn’t actually live there. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, his “place of abode or fixed place of business,” and this left the door open for prosecutors to charge him over what amounts to little more than a technicality.

And it is little more than a technicality.

Yakaitis is, in every sense, a peaceable and lawful gun owner who was otherwise eligible to obtain a license to carry in Pennsylvania. His sole crime was using a gun he lawfully acquired to defend himself on his own property without first completing an application and paying the county sheriff a $20 processing fee.

You read that sentence correctly.

He failed to complete an application and fork over $20 to the government before acting in self-defense. This is the sum and substance of what Pennsylvania requires for a license to carry a firearm in public. And Yakaitis’s failure to obtain such a license apparently warrants as much punishment as if he’d committed involuntary manslaughter, stalking, and “indecent” (i.e., sexual) assault.

While it might be easy to dismiss Yakaitis’s plight as a one-off instance of overzealous prosecution, this is, unfortunately, not a fluke.

Similar stories abound.

Consider Steve Thompson, a 52-year-old Philadelphia resident who in January 2022 used his lawfully owned firearm in justified self-defense during a confrontation with three men he caught stealing his catalytic converter. Prosecutors nonetheless determined that Thompson’s act of armed resistance to crime took place on a public street just outside the technical boundaries of his property and saw fit to pursue criminal charges against him for not having a license to carry.

This is apparently such a common occurrence that Philadelphia has started a diversion program specifically directed at otherwise lawful gun owners charged with carrying a firearm without a license.

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Punishing lawful gun owners like Yakaitis and Thompson does nothing to further the interests of public safety. It certainly isn’t justice.

Even if you vehemently oppose permit-less carry and firmly believe that failing to pay the government $20 necessitates some sort of punishment, there are plenty of alternatives to the current system.

For example, the state could statutorily require that first-time violators who are otherwise eligible for concealed carry license automatically receive a 60-day grace period during which they may obtain a license in exchange for having the original charges dropped and the record expunged.

Or, better yet, Pennsylvania could remove the criminal penalty entirely in such situations, and make it a fineable infraction akin to driving without a license.

Pennsylvania is coming off of a string of historically violent years, yet it remains obsessed with punishing peaceable gun owners who merely want to protect themselves against that violence.

All over technicalities and a $20 bill.

Stop the madness.