Washington, D.C. and Mayor Fenty still hate guns

By Brian S. Stewart

Mayor Adrian Fenty and the anti-gun elites of Washington D.C. recently unveiled the district’s inevitable response to the historic D.C. v. Heller decision by the United States Supreme Court. The Court struck down the District’s blanket ban on handgun ownership (including inside the home) en route to establishing the Second Amendment as an individual right.

On July 14th, the Mayor issued a press release laying out the new restrictions he plans to inflict on the city’s residents.

The legislation has four main components:

1. Continues to ban handguns in most places but creates an exception for self-defense in the home. The handgun ban remains in effect, except for use in self-defense within the home. Sawed-off shotguns, machine guns and short-barreled rifles are still prohibited.
2. Requires the Metropolitan Police Department to perform ballistic testing on handguns and makes such testing a registration requirement. The Chief of Police will require ballistics tests of any handgun submitted for registration to determine if it is stolen or has been used in a crime. Also, to serve as many residents as possible, the Chief will limit registrations to one handgun per person for the first 90 days after the legislation becomes law.
3. Clarifies the safe-storage and trigger-lock requirements. The legislation modifies existing law to clarify that firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and either disassembled secured with a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. An exception is made for a firearm while it is being used against reasonably perceived threat of immediate harm to a person within a registered gun owner’s home. The bill also includes provisions on the transportation of firearms for legal purposes.
4. Clarifies that no carry license is required inside the home. Residents who legally register handguns in the District will not be required to have licenses to carry them inside their own homes.

Handguns would still be banned, just not inside the home. Area-residents can still count on being totally at the mercy of D.C.’s astronomical crime rate the moment they leave their home. Law-abiding gun owners will have to register their firearms in order to legally have them inside the home, and registration is conditional upon a ballistic fingerprinting being done by the police department.

Most unbelievably, the district is clinging to its ridiculous “safe storage” requirement, though they’ve graciously made an exception for the moment when you actually are using the gun to defend yourself. Until then, you’re a lawbreaker.

This legislation seems ripe for the next round of legal challenges, as the district seems more than eager to maintain its reputation as the most common senseless city in America. They’ve effectively made ownership conditional upon registration. Would registering your individual right with the government before exercising that right be considered a “reasonable restriction”? Does ballistic fingerprinting qualify as a “reasonable restriction”? These are the battles on the horizon for defenders of the 2nd Amendment.

The arrogance and dishonesty on display by Fenty and his DC cronies is particularly offensive. The Washington Post recently got several DC bureaucrats to explain the new regulations, including Fenty.

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.

Willful stupidity is more clearly personified by the District’s Attorney General Peter Nickles:

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.

Of course they did. Mr. Nickles must also be ignorant of history (not just the law) – exactly how would law-abiding citizens keeping a gun in their home for self-defense qualify as a “Wild West scene”?

And Police Chief Cathy Lanier conceded that the district is indeed throwing up a battery of loops for citizens to jump through:

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.

Sadly, until then, residents of D.C. seem to have received only a momentary reprieve from draconian, anti-gun politicians intent on keeping their residents unarmed in the face of ever-present threats to their safety.

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.