By STEPHANIE FARR
Philadelphia Daily News

farrs@phillynews.com 215-854-4225

Florida has developed a computer program to track the number of Pennsylvania residents who possess concealed-carry-weapon permits issued by Florida.

This follows a Daily News article last week about a loophole in Pennsylvania's gun laws that allows residents who are denied a permit or whose permit is revoked here to obtain one from Florida.

As of Friday, 2,651 Pennsylvania residents carried a Florida permit, said Terry McElroy, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the agency that issues gun permits.

"We had to write a program but we did it," he said.

The Daily News was previously told by the bureau chief of the department's Division of Licensing that the numbers were unknown or untraceable because the state didn't keep track.

Philadelphia police said that even they were unable to get the numbers and were told that they would have to subpoena Florida to obtain them.

But, after the article and subsequent requests from other news outlets, the state developed a tracking program, McElroy said.

Under both states' reciprocity laws, any Pennsylvania resident with a permit to carry a concealed weapon does not need a permit to carry a concealed weapon in Florida.

But, in what Philadelphia police and prosecutors deem a "loophole" in the reciprocity law, Pennsylvania residents who were denied a permit or had theirs revoked are allowed to get one from Florida - through the mail - which then must be honored here.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and Gun Permit Unit commander Lt. Lisa King spoke out against the loophole and said that Florida's standards for granting concealed carry permits are far more lax than Philadelphia's.

But Pennsylvania gun-rights advocates said that Philadelphia's standards for granting permits are far more restrictive than anywhere else in the state and thus they are forced to go elsewhere, like Florida, to legally carry here.

"Pennsylvania feels our [Florida's] standards are as rigorous as their own but Philadelphia apparently has a different standard than the rest of the state," McElroy said. "Our legislation allows us to deal with states, not municipalities. That's what the law dictates."

Overall, Florida has issued 70,228 nonresident permits.

But McElroy said that he has no idea where Pennsylvania ranks compared to other states in the number of nonresident permits that have been issued.

"We would have to run a program for each state," he said.