Current Status of Gun Ownership In D.C.

Again from John R. Lott, from this FoxNews article, A Gun Ban By Any Other Name...

Lott tells the story of a D.C. man, a reporter, who spent $558.69 just in fees to get approved to buy a handgun.  Besides the fees, he spent nearly 16 hours on the process, made 4 trips to the police department, went through two background checks, was fingerprinted, took a five-hour class, and had to take a written test.


Part of the Heller decision was that the D.C. laws that required all firearms to be kept unloaded and locked was deemed to be unconstitutional.  Lott says, in his blog post about the article, "that D.C. law now requires that gun owners (primarily those owning long guns) only have to store their guns locked and unloaded if minors might have access to them."

I'm afraid to make any assumptions about what Lott said in the blog post, so I will just quote him as saying, "Despite the costs, about a thousand people may have gotten handgun permits. That is only about 0.2 percent of adults living in D.C."

More Guns, Less Crime In Wash. D.C., 2009

Besides the panic buying after the election in November '09, residents of Washington D.C. were going to gun shops for the first time, after the Supreme Court's ruling in D.C. vs Heller, that the disctrict could not reject all requests for handgun permits, and require that all other firearms be unloaded, locked up, and disassembled, so that they would be useless if needed for self defense.

(Supreme Court Ruling in PDF Format)

Washington's crime rate had risen in 2007, while crime rates fell in most cities across the country.  The Washington Post reports that, "The District is on track to have fewer killings than in any year since 1964."  The ban that was repealed after the Supreme Court decision, went into effect in 1976, by the way.  The Post credits faster reporting of crime via cell phones, better police relations in the community, and higher homicide closure rates for the decrease of crime in the city and surrounding areas, but I find it dubious at best that this turn around all happened between 2007 and 2009.

The gun ban lobby once again predicted bloody battles in the streets, but the police in the nation's capital report a 23% drop in homicides in 2009.  As the Supreme Court case was being heard, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty had said, "Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it does not require the district to stand by while its citizens die."  Shorty after the Supreme Court ruling, Mayor Fenty said, for the record, “I’m disappointed in the Court’s ruling and believe introducing more handguns into the District will mean more handgun violence.”


Second Amendment supporters knew better, though.  It's not hard to find similar cases where crime fell as gun control laws were lifted.

(this post was inspired by the "Gun News Ticker" in the January 2010 edition of The Gottleib-Tartaro Report, a 2nd Amendment Foundation publication)