Photo by cmunki.

Good morning, Washington. Obviously, it was going to be difficult to top headlines about the suspect in Thursday’s Columbia Heights shooting working in Jim Graham’s office — but leave it to a different kind of story about guns to do just that. Yesterday, the District made emergency changes to allow nearly 1,000 additional models of handguns to be possessed by citizens of the District. Weapons that are legal in the states of California, Massachusetts, and Maryland are now allowed in the District. The new regulations are available for reading here.

While the differences in some of the models which are now allowed are fairly superficial — now you can get a blue gun instead of a black gun! — it’s definitely a big win for gun rights advocates, as city officials are openly admitting that the rules changes is an attempt to avoid further lawsuits.

In other news this morning:

>> Councilmember Graham certainly was a busy bee around the listservs last night. In addition to letting us know the big news about Thursday’s shooting, he was also on top of a story about a partial building collapse on the 2200 block of 14th Street. The vacant property, squished in between the Dynasty Restaurant and Midtown Academy, will be razed in the coming days by DCRA according to Graham’s emails. 14th Street was closed off for a time yesterday afternoon — that had to do wonders for Friday afternoon’s commute.

>> Oh, hey, remember that whole swine flu business? Turns out that Maryland’s officially counted 334 cases of the virus in the state, but no one really knows — or cares — about the real count because no one’s being tested anymore. But, but…we were promised apocalypse!

>> If you work at Northern Virginia-based media machine Gannett, you should have already been prepping your resume — but in case you’ve been living under a rock, you might be out of work soon.