While waiting to see if the Supreme Court will do anything with 07-290 (District of Columbia v. Heller), on whether the Second Amendment protects a person’s right to own a gun, let’s look at this from the Washington Post:
Three decades ago, at the dawn of municipal self-government in the District, the city’s first elected mayor and council enacted one of the country’s toughest gun-control measures, a ban on handgun ownership that opponents have long said violates the Second Amendment.
All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a U.S. Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer?
Although studies through the decades have reached conflicting conclusions, this much is clear: The ban, passed with strong public support in 1976, has not accomplished everything that the mayor and council of that era wanted it to.
Over the years, gun violence has continued to plague the city, reaching staggering levels at times.
Marion Barry (D), a council member then as now and a supporter of the bill, put it bluntly at the time: “What we are doing today will not take one gun out of the hands of one criminal.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2 to 1 this past spring that the D.C. law was unconstitutional. That panel of judges found that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to bear arms, not just that of a “militia”.
But the city’s, and every major US city’s, failure to protect its residents is borne of the regrettable truth that even the best police force cannot perfectly protect the general population against violence. Accordingly, the people’s need for Second Amendment rights is inevitably, regardless of the city’s intentions, a matter of life and death. Period.
Supreme Court, Second Amendment, gun-control, handgun
