Emily Miller’s gun registration. Photo by @emilymiller

Yesterday afternoon, Emily Miller walked out of the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters the proud owner of a new, legally registered Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. She may have seemed like just another one of the 2,000 or so District residents that have registered handguns since the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the city’s longstanding handgun ban was unconstitutional, but Miller used her journey through the registration process to pen a widely read series of articles in The Washington Times and become an advocate for simpler gun registration rules in the District.

The Baltimore native, Georgetown grad, former Bush administration appointee and longtime resident said she had never much thought about owning a gun until late last year, when an incident at a friend’s house convinced her that she’d feel safer as a legal gun owner. And while it’s no longer illegal to own a handgun in the District, Miller found out that doing so requires navigating 17 steps outlined in a 22-page booklet of instructions and forms.

In the process, she sought out the only gun dealer in the District, a man who briefly went out of business last year, leaving District residents with no means to purchase a gun and city officials scrambling to find him an office. (He now works out of MPD headquarters.) She took a required safety class, which involved calling all 47 of the trainers recommended by MPD. She purchased a gun in Virginia, and had it transferred in to the District. All told, she spent four months digging her way through the gun registration bureaucracy, took three days off of work to complete various steps and shelled out close to $500 in fees, on top of the $781 her gun cost.

There was also the untold frustration, which is harder to quantify. “It’s my gun, it’s my purchase and it’s my right, and it felt so invasive of the government the way it is now. Anything that can be done that can get rid of some of these rules I’m in favor of,” Miller told us yesterday, her voice rising in a steady crescendo as her disbelief with the process became more and more apparent.

“Frankly, I think if I had started this process and wasn’t writing about and had gotten to the point where the [gun safety] class was five hours and $250, I definitely would have dropped out,” she said.

Miller’s new 9mm handgun. Photo by @emilymiller

Much to Miller’s relief, the District’s rules may soon be changing. Despite having been found constitutional by two federal courts, Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) announced late last year that he was introducing legislation that would allow residents to temporarily register their guns before they take the mandated gun safety course and scrap the existing ballistics test.

Miller isn’t only aware of Mendelson’s efforts, but she urged him to go further at a hearing last week and dump the gun safety course altogether. She isn’t alone in that fight. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who otherwise supports the registration of guns, argued that hopeful gun owners shouldn’t have to sit through a safety class when a simple video would suffice.

“I believe that requiring registrants to take a 4-hour class is not reasonable simply for firearm possession in the home. Instead, we urge the Council to consider our original proposal to allow MPD to provide a video on firearms safety and laws that registrants can watch at MPD or online,” she said.

Miller would also like to see the instructions and fees be made more clear, electronic filing be implemented and re-registration requirements dropped. Mendelson was quiet on what changes he plans on working into his bill once it is marked up at the end of the month, but he seemed to hint that some would come.

“I believe fundamentally in the value of registration. I’m aware that the courts have made clear that while we can burden the right to own a gun with regulations such as requiring registration, we need to be mindful that what we’re requiring has a real beneficial purpose to it. So, for example, I’m just not convinced that the ballistics test provides sufficient benefits and the training clearly has a benefit, but at the same time, how burdensome do we want to be? There’s this balancing that I keep looking at with regards to specific requirements,” he told us.

Of course, Mendelson hasn’t only been criticized by Miller and other gun advocates, but also by those that seek to keep the District’s registration rules intact. In a blog post after last week’s hearing, Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence accused Mendelson of being too sympathetic to the gun owners’ cause. (Clarification, 4:30 p.m.: Everitt was merely commenting on Mendelson having met with gun advocates, a gesture he said the advocates did not appreciate during the hearing.)

“I think that kind of rhetoric is unfortunate,” said Mendelson, noting that neither the NRA nor some gun control groups have made his job at balancing competing claims any easier. (Mendelson did recognize that Miller’s series likely caused MPD to update its list of trainers, which was out-of-date.)

Until she sees what Mendelson proposes, though, Miller isn’t going to let her newfound gun ownership distract from her advocacy on the issue. And while her wish that the District’s gun laws come to mimic Virginia’s likely won’t come to pass, Miller said that she plans on publishing a guide on how to easily register a gun in the city and hopes that some of what she said has an impact on Mendelson. She also expects that more District residents will start taking after her experience and registering their guns, especially if the rules are eased.

“The only thing this process is doing is stopping otherwise law-abiding citizens from registering their guns,” she said.

For now, though, Miller is enjoying her newfound status as a gun owner in the District. Next up? She needs ammunition.