WASHINGTON — For nearly 30 years, the D.C. government has
conducted a public policy experiment based on the theory that if
you deprive citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear
arms, you’ll reduce crime. Last week, federal district court judge
Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that that
experiment should continue. In his decision in Seegars v.
Ashcroft, et al., Judge Walton rejected a Second Amendment
challenge to the District’s comprehensive gun ban.
Of course, Judge Walton is under no illusions that depriving
citizens of their right to keep and bear arms actually results in a
safer city. Nor, interestingly enough, is the D.C. government
attorney defending the ban in Seegars. During oral
argument in the case last October, Walton and D.C. Corporation
Counsel Daniel Rezneck had the following exchange:
Walton: These laws don’t stop the bad guys from
getting the guns.
Rezneck: No.
Walton: The bad guys are going to get the guns
regardless.
Rezneck: I agree with that your honor.
As Rezneck and Walton admit, the D.C. government has done little
or nothing to disarm violent criminals. It has, however, done a
marvelous job of disarming law-abiding citizens who “work hard and
play by the rules,” as a certain Southerner used to put it. And as
a result, the District is the most dangerous large city in America
— edging out Detroit for the 2003 murder capital of the U.S.
Having failed in this most basic duty of government —
protecting the citizens — the District has responded, in
characteristic fashion, by defining deviancy down. In 2002 D.C.
Police Chief Charles Ramsey lowered his department’s goals for
solving homicides; where once D.C. aimed at a 65 percent clearance
rate, Ramsey decided that solving around half of the city’s murders
was good enough for government work.
Explaining his decision to lower the homicide clearance goal to
50.9 percent, Chief Ramsey told the Washington Post, “It’s
more encouraging…. You get these stretch goals, and when you
don’t even come near it, you get hammered for it.”
That’s the police department District residents are supposed to
depend on. If you live in the city and someone’s breaking your door
down, your only legal option is to call 911 and pray that the
police arrive on time. And you’d better pray. According to City
Council member Phil Mendelson, in 2002 nearly one in five 911 calls
was abandoned for failure to get through promptly.
Many District residents, like the plaintiffs in
Seegars, would like to have other options to protect
themselves. Standing in their way is a gun control scheme of almost
comic rigidity. You can’t own a handgun without a registration
certificate and you can’t get a registration certificate, because
the District stopped issuing them to ordinary citizens in 1976. If
you do happen to own a pre-1976 handgun that you registered back
when disco was king, you cannot lawfully carry it from room to room
in your own house without a license. And you can’t get a
license.
You can register certain rifles and shotguns. You just
can’t legally use them when your life is threatened. District law
requires all guns to be “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a
triggerlock” at all times — and it makes no exception for lawful
self defense. If a burglar confronts you in your home, and you load
your shotgun to defend yourself, you’ve just committed a
misdemeanor offense punishable by up to a year in jail.
One might suppose that such a regulatory scheme constitutes an
infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, if
anything does. But Judge Walton disagrees, declaring in the
Seegars opinion that “the Second Amendment does not confer
an individual right to possess firearms” but rather grants some
vague, unenforceable collective right.
Walton’s interpretation is, of course, at odds with the fairly
clear text of the Constitution. The Framers were careful enough
with language not to confuse the “right of the people” with the
rights of a state. Just as in the First and Fourth Amendments, “the
right of the people” in the Second Amendment is an individual
right.
A growing number of legal scholars, including such unlikely
gasbags as Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz, are coming to
recognize that the Second Amendment means what it says. So too have
the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Emerson case and
the Justice Department. Both have endorsed the view that the “right
of the people” is, well, the right of the people. This trend is one
more reason Judge Walton’s decision came as such a crashing
disappointment.
