Yet, while it may seem obvious to many people that banning guns will save lives, that has not been D.C.'s experience.
The ban went into effect in early 1977, but since it started there is only one year (1985) when D.C.'s murder rate fell below what it was in 1976. But the murder rate also rose dramatically relative to other cities. In the 29 years we have data after the ban, D.C.'s murder rate ranked first or second among the largest 50 cities for 15 years. In another four years, it ranked fourth.
For Instance, D.C.'s murder rate fell from 3.5 to 3 times more than Maryland and Virginia's during the five years before the handgun ban went into effect in 1977, but rose to 3.8 times more in the five years after it.
Was there something special about D.C. that kept the ban from working? Probably not, since bans have been causing crime to increase in other cities as well. D.C. cites the Chicago ban to support its own. Yet, before Chicago's ban in 1982, its murder rate, which was falling from 27 to 22 per 100,000 in the five years, suddenly stopped falling and rose slightly to 23 per 100,000 in the five years afterwards.
Neither have bans worked in other countries. Gun crime in England and Wales increased 340 percent in the seven years since their 1998 ban. Ireland banned handguns and center fire rifles in 1972 and murder rates soared — the post-ban murder rate average has been 144 percent higher than pre-ban.
How could this be? D.C. officials say that the ban will disarm criminals. But who follows a ban and turns their guns in? Criminals who would be facing long prison sentences anyway if they were caught in a crime, or typically law-abiding citizens? By disarming normal people, a gun ban actually makes crime easier to commit.
Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has actually sided with D.C. in important parts of the case, and the court has granted Solicitor General Paul Clement 15 minutes to make his argument. While largely paying lip service to the Second Amendment being an "individual right," the Department of Justice brief argues that an "unquestionable threat to public safety" from unregulated guns requires a lower standard must be adopted in defending it than is used to defend the rest of the Bill of Rights. But if they really believed that their evidence showed this, just as with the classic exception for the First Amendment of "falsely shouting fire in a theater," it wouldn't be necessary to treat the Second Amendment differently .
But what has not gotten much attention is that for the first time in U.S. history an administration has provided conflicting briefs to the Supreme Court. Vice President Dick Cheney has put forward his own brief arguing that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right that is no different than freedom of speech.
The DOJ constitutional argument is similar to that of D.C. It argues that since the government bans machine guns, it should also be able to ban handguns. And they claim that D.C. residents still retain a right to self-defense because the city doesn't ban locked shotguns and rifles. Locks, they claim , "can properly be interpreted" as not interfering with using guns for self-protection.
Factual errors underlie the rest of the argument — for in D.C., rifles and shotguns become illegal as soon as they are unlocked. That means the city can prosecute anyone who uses one in self-defense, even if it was locked before the incident. Is that a "reasonable" restriction on self-defense? Gunlock requirements are also associated with more deaths and more violent crime as they make defensive gun uses more difficult. Machine guns are also not banned .
It makes sense that the DOJ is backing the ban, given that it would lose regulatory power if it were struck down. As the DOJ lawyers note in the brief, striking down this ban could "cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation."
The Department of Justice and D.C. politicians can talk all they want about how necessary handgun bans are to ensure public safety and the "reasonableness" of the restrictions. But hopefully the Supreme Court will see past that. At some point, hard facts must matter. This is one point where public safety and individual rights coincide."
Read the mind of any of the law enforcement members who fight to disarm citizens (this is fairly easy:simply get one drunk and ask), and you'll see a common thread throughout. They are frightened witless over the mere thought of minorities with guns.
Well join the club. Time was when only the most courageous of persons would select law enforcement as a job because minorities with guns scares most people to distraction and we needed the brave to suit up to protect us.
Not anymore. All sorts of individuals want to pin on a badge but they want the job with far different rules than ever before. Since the bad guys can steal from the good guys, guns that you or I may own are ALL potential threats to the men and women in blue, and the way to remedy that is for everyone to be disarmed. There can be no other reason for law enforcements frantic call for disarmament, and when Florida led the way in CCW laws don't let anyone fool you into believing the police were on our side. As a group they continue to hassle law abiding citizens, and how many times must an open-carrier in VA or ANY of the states that allow it, be arrested for nothing more than exercising a God-given, state-sanctioned right? Forget letting the courts handle it, hoping that the justice system will finally start penalizing law enforcement for breaking the law, as it simply isn't going to happen.
Why DO the police hassle the average man so very much? Envy? The desire to be the top dog? The feeling that if YOU wear a gun, THEY (the bad guy minorities) will want to do it too?
Banning guns DOES save lives.
Police lives. The fewer guns in circulation means the harder a criminal must look to find one. But more and more of the poor common folk are killed because they don't have the same rights as LE.
99.999% of law enforcement has nothing to fear from firearms, as less than .01% of them are killed by guns each year*. 99.993% of the civilian population survives annually, as they are engaged in far more gun battles than LE and don't have boats and tanks and helicopters and machineguns and scores of men racing to the rescue to fight back with. Also, its a pretty well known fact that criminals do not attack police stations anywhere near the amount of time they do private residences and it might, just might, have something to do with the amount of guns inside.
The people who NEED firearms the most, are the ones the politicians and police want to have them the least.
93% of the time the sight of a firearm dissuades a criminal from acting any further, unless one happens to be in D.C. or some other anti-gun location that doesn't cotton with any of that defensive nonsense. Start whittling that number down because the common man is without a gun, and then lets talk about blood running in the streets.
*From various sources. 58 officers die from gunshot wounds each year and 13,000 non LE do as well.
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