Photo by yospyn

If you want to open a gun store in the District these days, you’d be limited to locations that were 300 feet away from schools, churches, recreation centers or playgrounds. One member of the D.C. Council wants that to change.

At a hearing of the Zoning Commission this week, Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who chairs the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, said he’d like to scrap the 300-foot rule altogether, allowing potential firearms entrepreneurs to set up shop in just about any commercial district in the city.

In an interview with DCist, Mendelson, who has overseen the many re-writes of the District’s gun laws since the city’s handgun ban was declared unconstitutional in 2008, said that he has seen just how small the market for guns really is over the last three years.

“An actual gun store is unlikely,” he said.

According to a Washington Post report published in February, only 1,400 guns have been registered in the District since June 2008, the majority in well-to-do neighborhoods. Mendelson noted that the District would, at most, see another transfer agent or two open up for business.

Currently, the only way to get a gun in the District is to buy it elsewhere and have it transferred in through Charles Sykes, the only federally licensed gun transfer agent in the city. After he lost his lease in Anacostia earlier this year, city officials moved quickly to set him up with an office inside the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters.

This week’s zoning hearing was to discuss making permanent a rule that would ditch the 300-foot rule for transfer agents — like Sykes — located in D.C. government buildings, but Mendelson floated just dumping the buffer altogether.

Any such change would require a new set of hearings before the Zoning Commission, allowing residents, ANCs and other legislators to voice their displeasure with the idea. (We reached out to the Gray administration for comment, but have yet to hear back. If we do, we’ll update.)

“Many residents would be surprised that [gun stores] are not the nuisance people would think they are,” said Mendelson, arguing that any stores would already have to contend with strict regulations on everything from inventory controls to limits on how guns could be displayed.