They're Coming for Your Guns

By Brian S. Stewart

Tucked into the final paragraph, a recent story in U.S. News and World Report highlighted the Washington D.C. Police Gun Recovery Unit, a unit of about two dozen officers whose mandate is exactly as it sounds:

Every day about two dozen officers fan out across the city's roughest neighborhoods, stopping drivers and pedestrians for traffic and other offenses and executing warrants in search of illegal guns.

The accompanying video will make law-abiding gun owners queasy.

In a city where gun ownership is a crime, the police can knock your door down and take them - and in D.C., they do. While the cops take great pains to imply that every gun they take is from a would-be killer or burglar, the article itself disputes that. In truth, the police are using a special unit to specifically target gun owners by executing traffic stops. "I noticed you came to a rolling stop at that intersection, sir - I'm going to need to search your vehicle."

The article, and the video, couches all of these stories by saying these operations take place in the "roughest neighborhoods." Yet it is in these "rough neighborhoods" that the law-abiding have the greatest reason to fear for their safety. Damon Wells of Cleveland lived in a neighborhood rough enough for a couple of armed thugs to walk up to his porch and try to rob him. He defended his life, killing one of the attackers. Despite the insinuations that this Gun Recovery Unit only takes guns from bad people, the reality is that in Washington D.C., Wells would be sitting on his porch unarmed (maybe because he had a busted taillight on his car), and his attackers would still be armed.

The officer in the video pulls a statistic seemingly from the sky, saying that because of his unit there has been a 30-40% drop in violent crime. I'm not sure what sort of tortured methodology leads to that conclusion, seeing that in the preceding paragraph the article acknowledges that D.C. saw a 7% increase in the homicide rate in 2007 to 181 murders, one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country.

No one wants guns in the hands of killers, rapists, and burglars. But the hard realities of the street ensure that until they're caught and put in prison, criminals will have access to guns. Blanket bans like D.C,'s only disarm the law-abiding. As one officer admits, "Most of the guns we're recovering are from people who, even without the ban, would not be allowed to have one anyway." Great, then lift the ban and focus the energies of these officers on the criminals instead of law-abiding gun owners who get swept up in draconian, blanket gun sweeps disguised as traffic stops.

Brian S. Stewart is a former infantryman and an Iraq War veteran. He recently graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in Political Science.