So, you may have heard that Washington Times opinion editor Emily Miller is in the market for a gun.
At least she’d like to be, what with the District’s firearms regulations among the toughest in the country, even with various Congressional attempts to force the District to permit concealed weapons to be brought in from states where such things are allowed.
In her first entry in the series, Miller went to the gun registry office at Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, because that’s where you go to buy a gun, right? (TBD’s Ryan Kearney had the spot-on comparison: trying to buy a car from the DMV.)
For the latest installment in her gun-quest, Miller on Friday updated her readers on all the paperwork and bureaucracy she’s had to wade through the past few months. Apparently, there’s quite a bit of it.
My quest started in October at the D.C. Gun Registry at the police department. I met with Officer Brown, who put piles of paper on the desk between us. “Here’s everything you need to know,” she said, pointing to a stack about a quarter-inch thick.
I asked where I could buy the gun. “You can go to any licensed dealer in another state – or on the Internet,” she said. “Then give this form to Charles Sykes downstairs, and he’ll go pick it up for you and transfer it.” I glanced through the registration packet and saw no reference to Mr. Sykes or transferring a gun. So I figured while I was there, I should track down this man, who seemed to play a key role.
Sounds imposing. To be fair, Miller’s got Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) on her side with respect to Sykes, who wants to make it easier for gun dealers to operate in the District. (Sykes started working from MPD after losing his lease in April 2011.)
As Miller tells it, she went home and dove into the 22 pages—gasp!—of forms and instructions in the registration packet. “Overwhelmed by the confusing forms and instructions, I started with the eligibility form,” she writes. As good a place to start as any, one supposes.
Then came time for the gun-safety class. But it’s tough to find a D.C.-certified instructor, especially when none of the approved instructors are allowed to conduct their classes within the city limits:
It seemed to me the D.C. politicians who came up with this requirement never considered the impact this would have on a woman trying to register a gun. Forcing us to go to a strange man’s house in another state to take a gun-safety class is not something the police should do. I called the National Rifle Association to see if I could take the class at its headquarters, but it didn’t have any D.C.-certified instructors.
Miller writes that she found a suitable instructor in Millersville, Md. (hey, they match!), with whom she spent four exhausting hours reading various pieces of literature about gun ownership: “This was nothing I couldn’t have read myself, but this is what the city required. As my eyes glazed over at the end, it was time for the shooting range.”
To borrow Kearney’s automotive analogy, when I was applying for my driver’s license, the State of New York required all new drivers to sit through a five-hour course that was basically just an old guy playing dated VHS tapes about car safety. Maybe Miller’s right. Maybe I could have skipped the afternoon of stock footage of Ford Crown Victorias eking out of driveways and just hopped in a car and driven off. Then again, five hours and whatever the class cost in 1999 was a small tradeoff for vehicular freedom.
But Miller survived training day, and now:
I’ve narrowed it down to four full-sized 9 mm semiautomatics that I’ve been able to handle well and shoot accurately. Once I complete this purchase, I will have 13 more steps to go before the city will allow me to protect myself.
Until she can pick up the gun, Miller is figuring out how best to wear the bullet belt TBD sent her for Christmas.
