The ungovernable city

You should all read David Freddoso's brilliant, angry, hilarious piece on the DC gun ban.

I hope that now you can understand where I am coming from when I read District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer’s hysterical court filing in the Heller case, which may strike down the District’s 31-year-old comprehensive ban on gun ownership.

“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”

What an excellent example of unintended humor — the District’s government is a national leader in standing by while its citizens die. Our homicide rate hit a 20-year low in 2005 — just 29 victims per 100,000 residents. That is slightly better than New York City’s rate (30.7) under Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, when the Big Apple suffered 2,250 homicides.

In 1991, the D.C. murder rate reached an astounding 81 per 100,000 — that was two years after Mayor Marion Barry famously told the Washington Press Club, “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

D.C. residents are strictly forbidden from owning handguns, even in the privacy of their homes. Any long guns must be registered and kept “unloaded and disassembled.” It is not even legal, strictly speaking, to assemble and load your gun when you hear an intruder downstairs. A lower court ruled the ban unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to take up the case.

In the debate over the gun ban, there is a strong statistical case that an armed citizenry is safer than one disarmed by unconstitutional laws, but this argument is not even necessary. There is absolutely no valid case that the District’s gun ban makes me safer as a District resident. When Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty (D., of course) penned a September 4 Washington Post op-ed stating that “The handgun ban has saved countless lives,” were they really suggesting that without the ban there might have been 1,000 murder victims in 1991, instead of just 482? The implication is that D.C. is so totally ungovernable that only a total deprivation of constitutional rights can make it barely livable.