D.C. Tries to Finesse Gun Ruling

[beevul]

D.C. Tries to Finesse Gun Ruling

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, July 17, 2008; Page B01

Mayor Adrian Fenty and his feisty attorney general, Peter Nickles, stood on the steps of the Wilson Building this week ostensibly to announce how the District will comply with the Supreme Court's rejection of Washington's ban on handguns. But really, they were delivering very much the opposite message: With only the narrowest of exceptions, we're sticking with our gun ban. Don't like it? Sue us.

"I am pretty confident that the people of the District of Columbia want us to err in the direction of trying to restrict guns," Fenty told me, smiling broadly at the suggestion that what he's really trying to do is make it as hard as possible for Washingtonians to keep a loaded gun at home.

Fenty and Nickles reject any interpretation of the court's decision as a clear statement that Americans may, with very few exceptions, keep and bear what Justice Antonin Scalia called "the quintessential self-defense weapon," the handgun. Rather, the D.C. officials read the decision as an almost academic ruling that although there may be a constitutional right to bear arms to protect yourself, that right is pretty much limited to folks whose house is being broken into right this very second.

The court ruled that there is "no doubt" that "the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms." But Nickles, the acting attorney general, said that "it's clear the Supreme Court didn't intend for you to have a loaded gun around the house. I don't think the court thought this was going to become a Wild West scene."

So the mayor and the D.C. Council enacted an emergency law setting up a cumbersome mechanism by which residents who want to own a gun legally may register a weapon if they clear a background check, pass a vision test and a written test on gun safety, pay a fee and wait for the bureaucracy to complete all these steps. "There are circumstances where it could take months," Police Chief Cathy Lanier conceded, and you could almost hear the elected officials around her emitting "heh-hehs" of mischievous delight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/16/AR2008071602491.html

A peek at the true mindset at work in DC?

""it's clear the Supreme Court didn't intend for you to have a loaded gun around the house. I don't think the court thought this was going to become a Wild West scene." - Nickles

The implication here is crystal clear, that having a loaded gun in the home is a "wild west scene".

Opinions on the statements made in the quoted?

[jody]

1. If the prominent Dem senators who support banning handguns will use their media podium to rail

against the Heller decision, they can keep bubbling the false rumor that our Democratic Party and its candidate for president Barack Obama are going to confiscate guns.

I wish they had the integrity to say they support banning handguns even thought the Democratic Party and Obama oppose such bans.

[spin]

4. No doubt that this resistance to the SCOTUS ruling will be..

used against Democrats in the upcoming election.

Finally just as the Democrat Party is beginning to realize that gun control is a losing issue, the idiots in D.C. go out of their way to drop their pants and moon the Supreme Court decision.

Now the pro-gun groups can use the mayor and the D.C. council to show why gun owners have to vote Republican.

Just as pro-gun Democrats finally feel that we can lay this issue to rest and concentrate on other more important issues, the anti-gun liberals in the party shoot us in the foot. Damn!

[MicaelS]

7. Come to think of it...

The only one of the usual suspects who said anything was Feinstein. Schumer didn't say boo. The most dangerous place in Washington DC is attempting to get between Senator Charles Schumer and a TV camera.:rofl:

[Callisto32]

2. Smacks of literacy tests for voting to me.

Also, the idea of the "wild west" that people have seems to be that everybody was ready to kill anybody at the drop of a hat. Maybe they need a history lesson.

[spin]

5. In the days of the "Wild West" living in the big cities of the ...

eastern U.S. may well have been as violent or more so than living in the frontier.

Popular wisdom says that generations of living on and conquering frontiers have made Americans a violent and lawless people. Popular wisdom is wrong. So is much scholarly literature that has drawn conclusions about violence and lawlessness from anecdotal evidence and specious assumptions.<70> The kind of crime that pervades American society today has little or no relation to the kind of lawlessness that occurred on the frontier if Aurora and Bodie are at all representative of western communities. Robbery of individuals, burglary, and theft occurred only infrequently and rape seems not to have occurred at all. Racial violence and serious juvenile crime were absent also. The homicides that occurred almost invariably resulted from gunfights between willing combatants. The old, the weak, the innocent, the young, and the female were not the targets of violent men. In fact, all people in those categories would have been far safer in Aurora or Bodie than they are today in any major U.S. city. Even most smaller cities and towns are far more crime ridden and dangerous than were Aurora and Bodie.

There simply is no justification for blaming contemporary American violence and lawlessness on a frontier heritage. The time is long past for Americans to stop excusing the violence in society by trotting out that old whipping boy, the frontier. On the contrary, it would seem that the frontier, instead of representing America at its worst may have, in many respects, represented the nation at its best. http://www.guncite.com/wild_west_myth.html

[Callisto32]

6. *hattip to spin*

[Recursion]

10. I know movies generally make bad public policy arguments

But whenever someone talks about "the wild west" I want to sit them down and make them watch Gangs of New York.

[spin]

3. Just who are the mayor and the council protecting...

honest citizens or the criminal element?

It would be a little strict, but requiring a vision test and a written test on gun safety isn't totally unreasonable. The test could be questionable unless it is prepared by someone with some knowledge of firearms and legal self defensive use.

But the D.C. approach is far beyond that. For example, if by some miracle or a long wait, you do manage to register a handgun, you better not use it to defend your life.

Fenty and Nickles reject any interpretation of the court's decision as a clear statement that Americans may, with very few exceptions, keep and bear what Justice Antonin Scalia called "the quintessential self-defense weapon," the handgun. Rather, the D.C. officials read the decision as an almost academic ruling that although there may be a constitutional right to bear arms to protect yourself, that right is pretty much limited to folks whose house is being broken into right this very second. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/16/AR2008071602491.html

But you also have to consider that the most common self defense type of handgun, the semi-auto, is being prohibited in D.C.

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District's 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit.

But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=74036&catid=158

Consider that D.C. has requirements for a weapon stored in the house:

The new legislation also modifies existing law to clarify that firearms must be stored unloaded and either disassembled or secured with a trigger lock, gun safe or similar device, officials said. There would be an exception for guns in the home that are being used against the "reasonably perceived threat of immediate harm." http://www.nbc4.com/politics/16876021/detail.html?rss=dc&psp=news

If the weapon must be stored unloaded the fastest handgun to load is a semi-auto. In an emergency, you open your gun safe grab the weapon and a magazine
(clip for those who need a class on gun terminology) insert the magazine into the "bottom feeder", rack the slide and you're ready to go. A revolver is normally a lot slower and more difficult to load in an emergency. (Yes, you can use speed loaders but they are very easy to fumble.)

So you hear glass breaking at 3 am and you manage to grab your weapon and load it. You confront an armed bad guy and shoot him. With the attitude in D.C., I suspect that when all the legal bullshit ends, you'll just wish you would have called 911.

[Duke Newcombe]

8. Next lawsuit in 5...4...3... n/t

Duke

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

9. Idiots.

Not much else to say really.

David