Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
The timing was impeccable. On Friday morning, newspapers across the country ran versions of a story highlighting increases in violent crime in cities nationwide — but not, as it turned out, in Washington, where for over a decade crime has trended in one direction only. Hours later, the D.C. Circuit lowered its boom on behalf of six gun-desiring Washingtonians and the libertarian Institute for Justice, finding that the city’s longstanding ban on handguns ran afoul of the Second Amendment. Today, as Mayor Fenty promises to battle the ruling to the bitter end, we learn about the people behind the lawsuit. Unsurprisingly, most of them feel unsafe without their guns.
I won’t pretend to knowledge I don’t have in matters of constitutional law; if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s ruling, I’m in no position to argue. I personally don’t like guns, but I don’t feel the need to man the barricade over this particular bit of legal wrangling, mainly because I don’t think it will affect things all that much. Handguns have been outlawed in the city for 30 years, and during that time homicides nearly tripled and then fell by more than two-thirds. Maybe there are thousands of people waiting for the law to change so that they can run out and buy a shiny new weapon. Something tells me that’s not the case, but even so we shouldn’t expect a marginal change in gun ownership to alter crime numbers nearly as powerfully as other forces have done in recent decades.
I don’t think it’s correct to say, however, that this change doesn’t constitute a problem for the city. I find it very interesting that libertarian forces have arrayed themselves against the D.C. government in this case, because they’re both essentially fighting for the same tired and vastly overestimated approach to crime. The problem is that their side continues to monopolize the discussion at the expense of real safety for residents of the District of Columbia.
Photo by IntangibleArts.
