Will D.C. Replace a Handgun Ban With Prohibitive Regulations?
Jacob Sullum | July 15, 2008, 5:42pm
Yesterday the District of Columbia unveiled new firearm rules that are meant to comply with the Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning D.C.'s 32-year-old handgun ban. The proposed legislation makes an exception to the ban for handguns kept in the home for self-defense, and it "clarifies that no carry license is required inside the home." It also "clarifies" the storage rule for firearms, saying a gun can legally be unlocked and loaded "while it is being used against [a]reasonably perceived threat of immediate harm to a person." Otherwise "firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and either disassembled [or] secured with a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device." The mention of gun safes is new and, depending on the kind of safe, could allow faster retrieval of a weapon in an emergency. But the requirement that even guns in safes be kept unloaded seems like an unreasonable impediment to self-defense that could be open to challenge.
The city continues to maintain that "most semiautomatic pistols" remain illegal under D.C.'s "machine gun" ban, which bizarrely covers not just automatic weapons but "any firearm which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily converted or restored to shoot...more than 12 shots without manual reloading," even if each trigger pull fires just one round. As I pointed out last month, there is no shortage of pistols that fire 12 or fewer rounds, but I don't know how many of them "can be readily converted" to fire more than that. If the city claims any handgun that can accept (or be modified to accept) a magazine holding more than 12 rounds is prohibited, would that cover "most semiautomatic pistols"? All handguns except "revolvers and derringers," as the Violence Policy Center argues?
Meanwhile, the procedure for legally owning whichever handguns are allowed sounds pretty onerous:
a. A District resident who seeks to register a handgun must obtain an application form from MPD's Firearms Registration Section and take it to a firearms dealer for assistance in completing it.
b. The applicant must submit photos, proof of residency and proof of good vision (such as a driver's license or doctor's letter), and pass a written firearms test.
c. If the applicant is successful on the test, s(he) must pay registration fees and submit to fingerprinting. MPD will file one set of fingerprints and submit the other to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for analysis and criminal background check.
d. MPD will notify the applicant whether all registration requirements are satisfied. At that point, the applicant returns to the Firearms Registration Section to complete the process and receive MPD's seal on the application.
e. The applicant takes his or her completed application to a licensed firearm dealer to take delivery of the pistol. If the dealer is outside the District, the dealer transports the pistol to a licensed dealer in the District to complete the transaction.
f. The applicant takes the pistol to the Firearms Registration Section for ballistics testing. When testing is complete, the applicant may retrieve the pistol and take it home.
The question is whether D.C. will make it so difficult to possess guns and use them in self-defense that it will end up back in court on the losing end of another Second Amendment lawsuit.
[Thanks to John Kluge for the tip.]
Elemenope | July 15, 2008, 11:01pm | #
Wowsers! I think this is the first time I personally have been trolled on this board. Happy day! ;)
Loaded questions abound, but...
1)Socialist InSecurity-- For or against?
I don't find retirement accounts to be a particularly bad thing. I'm not crazy about taxation in support of it, and there must be a better way to provide for those who are no longer of working age but still have every right to continue existing. Many people are fortunate enough and have enough foresight to save when they are working; some do not have the capacity to do so. I certainly don't think millions of octogenarians rotting in the streets is a great idea. No, I am not particularly intimidated by the notion that this comes perilously close to "socialist sympathy" around here.
2)8th month abortion- For or against?
Asking someone whether they are "for abortion" is kind of like asking someone whether they are "for nazis" if they happen to believe in free speech. My personal political philosophy is rooted in the notion that all freedom is derived not from "natural rights" or from property, but from the simple physical autonomy of the human body (you are in control over most of its actions, and cannot ever escape it as a prison). It's hard to take that seriously and not come to the unhappy but necessary consequence that a woman has absolute control over their body and whatever happens to be growing in it. I find the violinist thought experiment to be decisive.
3)"Progressive" taxation- For or against?
For, but not for any silly leveling or "socialist" reason. It simply occurs to me that owners of the means of production benefit disproportionately from the creation and maintenance of infrastructure. So, they should pay proportionately to their own benefit.
4)"Waterboarding" is torture?- for or against?
Torture. Torture=Bad. A fucking five year old knows this. Apparently only partisan hacks do not. One thing is for certain; everyone knows that torture is wrong to be applied to *themselves*. What deficiency in human empathy causes people to fail to cross that narrow gap to the other is quite beyond my reckoning.
5)"Public Education"- for or against?
Against. But the private market is not robust enough to step into the gap instantly. And I should also point out that the peculiar conditions that created a universally literate population without public education a hundred years ago no longer exist in this country, and are unlikely to return even if public schools were closed tomorrow. Too much has changed with our labor structure, such as, among other things, women working rather than being at home teaching their kids how to read. Our civil structure is heavily dependent upon the assumption of a literate population.
6)"Medicaid/Medicare"" -- for or against?
Against. However, the private system also blows chunks, far more than mere market pressures suggest it ought to. You got a fix for that? Ever been sick?
7)"School vouchers" (competition is good), "gay adoption" (of course), "mass transit subsidies" (not crazy about them), "glowball warming" (probably is happening, but is a poor reason to use for policy when there are much easier criteria to use to come to similar conclusions), etc.
I also like guns and drugs. Alot. Both personally, and as a matter of commerce.
Lower taxes are generally good if they are accompanied by reduced spending. Not all spending is equal; Gen. Bradley was right in saying that every dollar spent on a tank of a missile is doubly a theft, and I would just as soon not shed a tear if every dollar spent on foreign wars and massive military exostructure was instead diverted to the uplifting of the human condition. It would be a supreme good to be able to reduce all taxes and reduce all spending, but priorities can still remain within that framework.
Markets are extremely impressive distributed data aggregation machines, but they cannot solve all problems. Just most of them that include a problem involving distributed data aggregation. Not so much for problems that have little to do with information.
Perhaps you should mention where your "liberal agenda" is actually different than joe's "liberal agenda"?
I disagree with joe on, among other things, the utility of labor unions, the usefulness of regulation, the proper limits of government intervention in the marketplace, judicial philosophy, movie taste, and those are just the ones I've had the privilege of discussing with him. I'm sure there are many more.
I still imagine him to be a more productive and more decent human being than you, anon, just given the limited data set we have before us today. Prove me wrong, if you can.
