2008 Woodie Awards
Busting a cap in the gun law
Nadine Goldman
Issue date: 4/5/07 Section: Op/Ed
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Though it received little media attention, the ruling last month by the U.S. Court of the Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit striking down Washington D.C.'s stringent anti-gun law and upholding the Second Amendment right to bear arms was a landmark ruling, and ultimately, a victory for all.
There's the obvious benefit to residents of D.C. Despite having the toughest gun law around, which banned handguns registered after 1977 and forbid the few legal gun owners from carrying handguns in their homes, Washington, D.C. has a notoriously high crime rate. The number of murders and other gun-related crime in D.C. has increased from the time that the gun ban was enacted in 1976. Tom Palmer, a D.C. resident who was among the six people who went to court to challenge the city's 30-year old gun ban, was an assault victim himself and wants to keep a gun in his house for protection.
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Adrian Fenty, D.C. Mayor, claimed that this ruling "flies in the face of laws that have helped decrease gun violence in the District of Columbia" and D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey blamed lax gun control in Virginia and Maryland for supplying criminals in D.C. with guns. But these claims just don't hold. D.C. follows the trend documented in a book by John R. Lott, Jr. called More Guns, Less Crime, which studied crime rates and gun uses in all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years; Lott found that states currently experiencing the largest drop in crime are the ones that have the least restrictive gun laws. This seems counter-intuitive at first, especially in light of what we've been told by the gun control advocates, but logically, it makes sense. Guns give law-abiding citizens the opportunity to defend themselves and simply put, an armed person is an unattractive target for a criminal assault. It explains why neighboring counties in Virginia and Maryland, with much fewer restrictions on gun ownership, experience far less gun violence than Washington D.C., which has some of the most restrictive policies in the country. We see this trend worldwide too, where the United Kingdom and Australia have the toughest gun ownership laws and the highest crime rates, with the UK off the charts at 58 offenses per 100 inhabitants each year.
There's the obvious benefit to residents of D.C. Despite having the toughest gun law around, which banned handguns registered after 1977 and forbid the few legal gun owners from carrying handguns in their homes, Washington, D.C. has a notoriously high crime rate. The number of murders and other gun-related crime in D.C. has increased from the time that the gun ban was enacted in 1976. Tom Palmer, a D.C. resident who was among the six people who went to court to challenge the city's 30-year old gun ban, was an assault victim himself and wants to keep a gun in his house for protection.
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Adrian Fenty, D.C. Mayor, claimed that this ruling "flies in the face of laws that have helped decrease gun violence in the District of Columbia" and D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey blamed lax gun control in Virginia and Maryland for supplying criminals in D.C. with guns. But these claims just don't hold. D.C. follows the trend documented in a book by John R. Lott, Jr. called More Guns, Less Crime, which studied crime rates and gun uses in all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years; Lott found that states currently experiencing the largest drop in crime are the ones that have the least restrictive gun laws. This seems counter-intuitive at first, especially in light of what we've been told by the gun control advocates, but logically, it makes sense. Guns give law-abiding citizens the opportunity to defend themselves and simply put, an armed person is an unattractive target for a criminal assault. It explains why neighboring counties in Virginia and Maryland, with much fewer restrictions on gun ownership, experience far less gun violence than Washington D.C., which has some of the most restrictive policies in the country. We see this trend worldwide too, where the United Kingdom and Australia have the toughest gun ownership laws and the highest crime rates, with the UK off the charts at 58 offenses per 100 inhabitants each year.