If your gun goes missing, you'd better report it, a Pittsburgh City Council majority declared yesterday in approving a measure designed to keep firearms from criminals, but also likely to keep lawyers busy.

Council's legislation requires owners of lost or stolen guns to report that to police within 24 hours or face fines and possible imprisonment.

If it wins final approval next week and is ever enforced, it will likely end up in court, said Councilman Bruce Kraus, one of its authors. He welcomed the court fight.

"We know what we're doing is activism," he said. "It's what we intended to do."

Council's initial vote was 6-1, meaning the measure has enough support to overcome a veto. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's office said yesterday that he hadn't decided whether to sign the measure, veto it, or allow it to become law without his signature.

Still, the advocacy group pushing for the measure here and in eight other cities called council's vote "a victory for common sense," in the words of Ceasefire PA Executive Director Joe Grace.

It's designed to keep so-called straw purchasers from buying guns, selling them to criminals who can't pass background checks, and then claiming the weapons were lost or stolen when police recover and trace them.

Stopping straw purchases is a great goal, said Councilman Ricky Burgess, but a city law isn't the way to do it. He cited two state laws that, in his view and that of city lawyers, bar municipalities from writing any rules on the transfer, ownership, transportation or possession of firearms.

"I'm not willing to participate in a hoax on my communities," he said after the vote.

He said council members knew they were voting for something that runs afoul of state law.

"Do I now go home to the crack cocaine dealers on the corners and say, if you don't like the law, you don't have to follow it?"

Mr. Burgess's vote disappointed Adrienne Young, executive director of the Tree of Hope Foundation, who lost a son 14 years ago to a triggerman with an illegally purchased gun. She said she was surprised "that he wouldn't support any measure to stop some of this carnage. ... I think that any effort is worth a try and worth fighting for."

That logic won the day in council.

"Who really cares about it being unconstitutional?" said Councilwoman Tonya Payne. "This is what's right to do, and if this means that we have to go out and have a court battle, then that's fine ... We have plenty of dead bodies coming up in our streets every single day, and that is unacceptable."

Councilman Dan Deasy abstained, saying he hasn't had time to review the issue. So did Patrick Dowd, saying he thought it might lead to nothing but an expensive court fight.

Philadelphia's lost and stolen gun reporting law has been tied up in litigation, drawing fire from the state Legislature and National Rifle Association and losing before a Commonwealth Court panel. It's on its way to the state Supreme Court.

Similar measures recently passed in Allentown and Pottsville, and are under consideration in Bethlehem, Easton, Lancaster, Reading and York, according to Mr. Grace.