D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown may have offered inconclusive answers on last year’s infamous fully-loaded luxury SUV scandal, but more recently he’s been nothing but a straight shooter.

Quite literally, in fact. Last week Brown joined Washington Times columnist Emily Miller for a trip to a shooting range in Lorton, Virginia. Miller, a D.C. resident who recently purchased and registered a gun (and wrote a long series about the process), had invited him as a means to encourage him to loosen up the city’s strict gun registration rules.

So how did Brown fare? Quite well, reported Miller today:

Mr. Brown was not afraid of the gun. On his first try, all his rounds landed in the blue part of the silhouette target. “Great job,” I said, after bringing back the target to get a closer look.

“Not good enough. Put it back out there. Let’s do it again,” he said. This time, he shot almost all in the nines and had two good groupings. After a couple more magazines with the .22, he was ready for more of a challenge. I loaded my 9 mm and showed him its basic controls. He took the gun and placed all his shots in or around the bull’s-eye. We decided he needed a new paper target to show his improvement. “I’m gonna tear this up,” he said, clipping up another blue target, and he did.

The chairman walked to the lane where Mr. Strickland was shooting his own .40 caliber Glock. Mr. Brown wanted to compete with Mr. Strickland, who has been shooting all his life in his home state of Missouri. They put their targets as far back as possible to see who could get a head shot first. To make it a little fairer, Mr. Brown shot with the .22 and Mr. Strickland used the .40. Still, Mr. Brown won handily. He got the head on the second shot, then hit three more. “Ben’s Chili dogs on you, LeJuan,” Mr. Brown said, laughing at his bemused aide.

Brown’s trip was certainly well-timed: the D.C. Council will vote today on emergency legislation that would ease the process of registering a handgun in the city. According to a legislative memo written by Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), the emergency vote is needed to implement the provisions of the law more quickly; with the usual 60-day congressional review for these types of legislation, it could take until the fall for them to take effect if the council doesn’t approve the emergency measure, he wrote.

That’s great for Miller, but not enough. “In particular, the District still needs to recognize our right to bear arms with concealed carry,” she wrote. D.C. and Illinois are among the few places in the country that forbid residents to carry concealed weapons. For gun advocates, this makes the city a more dangerous place. For opponents, well, concealed weapons would make the city a more dangerous place.

For now, concealed carry may be a bit of a stretch for D.C.—Police Chief Cathy Lanier inveighed against it during a hearing in January. “The District of Columbia, as the seat of the Federal government, with its multitude of critical official and symbolic buildings, monuments, and events, and high-profile public officials traversing the streets every day, is a city filled with ‘sensitive’ places. Our laws should reflect that reality.”