Permit or no, and in PA there is no permit for each specific handgun, just one concealed carry license that covers any registered handgun you buy (handguns are registered at the time of purchase) it’s entirely possible that this guy got arrested for having a loaded handgun in the trunk of the car.
I don’t know the specific laws in the state that your friend lives in, but it’s not impossible that there is a state provision against having a loaded firearm in the trunk of a car and that such an infraction is an arrestable offense. I’ve got a concealed carry license, and if I screw up the transportation of a firearm I legally own, I’m going to jail, license or no. The license itself will also be revoked.
I had a “friend” named Robert, who was a pathological liar and so desperate was he to tell a tale and wow the crowd, that he started telling urban legends as if they were actual true stories that happened to him or someone he knew personally. One day as he was telling the old chest nut about a guy waking up from a one night stand and finding the girl gone and a message scrawled in lipstick on the mirror that said… welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS… I started mouthing the story along with him and when he got to that last line, I belted it out with him. After his initial flabbergasted facial expression, he actually tried to defend it and stand by his statement that it was a true story. ::sigh:: He lied so much that now our name for a liar, any liar, is “Pathological Robert”.
My grandma had a good way of dealing with liars. Any time her BS barometer went off, she would say “Now you and me both know you’re lying”. haha. Straightforward. It’s kind of sad when you consider what drives a pathological Robert to spew the nonsense that they do, but it can be so annoying. Maybe if more people called them on their BS it would make them think twice.