Citizen Disarmament in D.C.
by Gene Healy
Gene Healy is senior editor at
the Cato Institute.
For nearly 30 years, the D.C. government has
conducted a public policy experiment based on the theory that if you deprive
citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, you'll reduce
crime. Two weeks ago, federal district court judge Reggie Walton, a George W.
Bush appointee, ruled that that experiment should continue. In his decision in Seegars v. Ashcroft, et al., Judge Walton rejected a Second
Amendment challenge to the District's comprehensive gun ban.
Of course, Judge Walton is under no illusions that
depriving citizens of their right to keep and bear arms actually results in a
safer city. Nor, interestingly enough, is the D.C.
government attorney defending the ban in Seegars.
During oral argument in the case last October, Walton and D.C. Corporation
Counsel Daniel Rezneck had the following exchange:
Walton: These laws don't stop the bad guys from getting the
guns.
Rezneck: No.
Walton: The bad guys are going to get the guns regardless.
Rezneck: I agree with that your
honor.
As Rezneck and Walton admit, the
D.C. government has done little or nothing to disarm violent criminals. It has,
however, done a marvelous job of disarming law-abiding citizens who "work
hard and play by the rules," as a certain Southerner used to put it. And,
as a result, the District is the most dangerous large city in
Having failed in this most basic duty of government --
protecting the citizens -- the District has responded, in characteristic
fashion, by defining deviancy down. In 2002, D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey
lowered his department's goals for solving homicides; where once D.C. aimed at
a 65 percent clearance rate, Ramsey decided that solving around half of the
city's murders was good enough for government work.
Explaining his decision to lower the homicide clearance
goal to 50.9 percent, Chief Ramsey told the Washington Post: "It's more
encouraging.... You get these stretch goals, and when you don't even come near
it, you get hammered for it."
That's the police department District residents are
supposed to depend on. If you live in the city and someone's breaking your door
down, your only legal option is to call 911 and pray that the police arrive on
time. And you'd better pray. According to City Council member Phil Mendelson, in 2002 nearly one in five 911 calls was
abandoned for failure to get through promptly.
Many District residents, like the plaintiffs in Seegars, would like to have other options to protect
themselves. Standing in their way is a gun control scheme of almost comic
rigidity. You can't own a handgun without a registration certificate and you
can't get a registration certificate because the District stopped issuing them
to ordinary citizens in 1976. If you do happen to own a pre-1976 handgun that
you registered back when disco was king, you cannot lawfully carry it from room
to room in your own house without a license. And you can't get a license.
You can register certain rifles and shotguns. You just
can't legally use them when your life is threatened. District law requires all
guns to be "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" at
all times -- and it makes no exception for lawful self-defense. If a burglar
confronts you in your home, and you load your shotgun to defend yourself,
you've just committed a misdemeanor offense punishable by up to a year in jail.
One might suppose that such a regulatory scheme constitutes
an infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, if anything
does. But Judge Walton disagrees, declaring in the Seegars
opinion that "the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to
possess firearms" but rather grants some vague, unenforceable collective
right.
Walton's interpretation is, of course, at odds with the
fairly clear text of the Constitution. The Framers were careful enough with
language not to confuse the "right of the people" with the rights of
a state. Just as in the First and Fourth Amendments, "the right of the
people" in the Second Amendment is an individual right.
A growing number of legal scholars,
including such unlikely characters as Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz, are coming to recognize that the Second
Amendment means what it says. So too have the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals in the Emerson case and the Justice Department. Both have endorsed the
view that the "right of the people" is, well, the right of the
people. This trend is one more reason Judge Walton's decision came as such a
crashing disappointment.
This article was published in The
American Spectator online,