D.C.'s gun lessons
The Washington TIMES

Nov. 18, 2006

The incoming Democratic powers-that-be in the congressional leadership and on the Senate and House Judiciary Committees are a who's who of the gun-control movement: Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Patrick Leahy, John Conyers, Dick Durbin, Joseph Biden, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid and Herb Kohl, to name a few.

If and when gun control roars back to life in 2007-08 -- we expect that it will -- the data unearthed this week in these lawmakers' own backyards by reporter Matthew Cella should loom large.

The District of Columbia's gun-murder numbers show yet again that stringent gun-control laws have little or no utility in curbing the violence, even as they strip citizens of their Second Amendment rights. And, indeed, the trend nationwide since 1991 has been a drop in crime at the same time gun-control laws were loosened. Since 1977, the nation's capital has kept some of the country's strictest gun laws on the books. And yet, as Mr. Cella showed Friday in The Washington Times, over the period 2001-05, about 80 percent of murders in the District were perpetrated with guns -- a ratio slightly higher than in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Atlanta.

Overall homicide levels in the District are troublingly high and have not been helped by gun control. Which is no wonder: Violent criminals can wield guns confident that they will not get caught, and confident that law-abiding people will not have guns themselves.

D.C.'s gun lessons