DC forcing people to reregister and re-finger print gun owners, new fees

DC claims that it lost all the finger prints of everyone who has registered their guns in DC.  Emily Miller has the story available here.

Federal Judge Strikes Down DC's ban on concealed handguns, for non-residents DC is at least temporarily a constitutional carry area

A copy of the decision and some analysis of it along with key quotes is available here.

House of Representatives passed a budget amendment that would have only federal gun control regulations in DC

By a 241 to 181 vote, the House passed a budget amendment by Rep. Thomas Massie limiting DC gun control laws to those passed by the federal government.  From The Hill Newspaper:

. . . Rep. Thomas Massie's (R-Ky.) amendment to the fiscal 2015 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill, which includes a $637 million federal payment for the District of Columbia, would prohibit funding to enforce its handgun ban and other gun laws. The amendment passed 241-181. 

Massie said the District's gun laws ran counter to the Supreme Court's ruling on the issue. 

"Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller that struck down the D.C. handgun ban, as well as the unconstitutional gun lock provision, it's still difficult for D.C. residents to exercise their God-given rights to bear arms," Massie said.Massie said the District's gun laws ran counter to the Supreme Court's ruling on the issue. . . . .

Updating the changes in DC's crime rates since Heller

Over the last few years, I have been chronicling how DC murder and violent crime rates have changed before and after the Supreme Court's Heller decision (see here and here).  The Supreme Court's decision came down the end of June 2008, though it took about a month for DC to change its gun laws.  So as to compare the same period of time each year before and after the ban, the following numbers look at the first seven months of each year.

What I have pointed out is that even though very few handgun permits have been issued (only a few thousand the last time that I looked), the big change in DC was the court striking down the ban on having loaded long guns in the District.  It had been a felony to chamber a bullet or a shotgun shell.  When the Supreme Court made its decision over 72,000 adults legally owned long guns.  After the decision, almost a quarter of the adult population were suddenly able to legally use those guns for self defense.

The Boston Globe has this story about the huge recent drop in homicides in DC, but the article fails to note that the drop started right after the Supreme Court decision.  How can one write a story on this without mentioning the court's decision?  The article mentions the crack epidemic.  Crack was indeed a problem, but that problem ended in the early 1990s.

Vet loses guns to DC police as he travels through nation's capitol

A wounded Vet gets thrown in jail after stopping at Walter Reed for medical treatment. The legal costs and time in jail are something you don't want to put anyone through. Even after the charges were dropped, DC refused to return his guns. From The Washington Times:

Returning to South Carolina on June 30, 2010, Mr. Kim stopped at Walter Reed for a doctor’s appointment. Afterwards, he got lost while driving his two-door Honda Civic in downtown D.C. in the evening. He was pulled over by police. The officer said that his driver’s license had been suspended. He was unaware of this. He found out the next morning that it was wrongly suspended due to a clerical error in which North Carolina incorrectly reported to South Carolina that he didn't pay a speeding ticket. Mr. Kim called and had this cleared up the next morning. However, because of the suspended license, the D.C. police officer called for backup, and told Mr. Kim he would have to go to the police station. Then the cops asked Mr. Kim if they could search his vehicle. The lieutenant agreed because his guns were properly locked in a case in the trunk, in compliance with federal firearm transport laws. Mr. Kim was handcuffed and told to sit on the curb during the search. He recalled that the officers inspected the collection and “were upset about the fact that I had the AR-15, which D.C. considers to be an ‘assault weapon.’” The model of rifle is illegal in the District, but not in his home state. The officers then told Mr. Kim he was in violation for the carrying firearms outside the home (in his vehicle) in the District. The nation’s capital does not acknowledge the right to bear arms, so there are no carry rights. “I told them I had been under the impression that as long as the guns were locked in the back, with the ammunition separate, that I was allowed to transport them,” Mr. Kim told me in an interview. “They said, ‘That may be true, however, since you stopped at Walter Reed, that make you in violation of the registration laws.” It is illegal to possess a firearm anywhere in D.C. other than the home. Mr. Kim’s attorney, Richard Gardiner, said his client was lawfully transporting the firearms, and that would have been his defense if the matter went to trial. “The mistake he made was agreeing to a search of his vehicle,” the attorney explained in an interview. “If the police ask for consent to search, the answer is ‘no.’ If they ask, ‘why not?’ The answer is, ‘no.’” . . .

A sign of the times changing: DC politician goes to shooting range

From the Washington Times:

When one of the District of Columbia’s top political leaders is willing to spend a day at the shooting range with a new gun owner, it’s a sign the capital city may be ready to put aside the past. For 30 years, Washington banned handguns, only to face a Supreme Court rebuke in 2008. Now the city is about to make it easier for law-abiding residents to legally own a firearm.
On Tuesday, the D.C. Council is expected to pass the Firearms Amendment Act of 2012 under expedited procedures so it can take effect this summer. The ordinance will do away with many of the expensive and time-consuming hurdles to registering a gun in the District that were put in place after the court’s decision.
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown, who will vote for the bill, has made a 180 on gun rights. Last fall, when I began my series “Emily Gets Her Gun,” about the process of getting a legal handgun in the District, I asked Mr. Brown if he thought the city was adhering to the high court’s decision that the gun ban was unconstitutional.
He didn’t answer directly. “The real question is how do we reduce crime, how do we get people back to work,” Mr. Brown said. “When you do that, so you can reduce crime, so it reduces the fear of crime.” I pointed out that higher gun ownership always leads to less crime. . . .

DC drags feet on correcting false info on DC's gun laws

From the Washington Times:

Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has had two weeks to remove false information about the city’s gun transport laws from its forms and website. It has no interest in doing so. . . . MPD's firearms registry has at least six full-time staff who answer questions about gun laws and regulations asked over the phone or in person. Unfortunately, the police officers do not appear to understand the legal code they are in charge of interpreting, which means gun owners are being given bad advice regarding activities that could result in a felony arrest. . . .

Washington Examiner piece: "Ask Canada -- gun registration won't make D.C. safer"

My piece with Gary Mauser in the Washington Examiner starts this way:

The D.C. Council will soon vote on a new law that would eliminate several obstacles for gun buyers -- a five-hour training course, ballistics testing, a vision test, and a ban on certain types of ammunition. But they will leave unchanged the registration requirement for gun owners. D.C. could learn a lot from Canada's decision to finally rescind its gun registry in February.Beginning in 1998, Canadians spent a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a registry for long guns -- in the U.S., the same amount per gun owner would come to $67 billion. For all that money, the registry was never credited with solving a single murder. Instead, it became an enormous waste of police officers' time, diverting their efforts from traditional policing activities. . . .

Some relevant links are here:

 D.C. Council panel agrees to discard some gun rules

 Fox Can't Keep Story Straight On D.C. Gun Laws

"D.C.’s made-up gun laws"

Emily Gets Her Gun series has some interesting stories.

Washington, D.C. police appear prepared to arrest gun owners even if they aren’t breaking the law. Transporting a gun through the District, whether as a resident or visitor, is not nearly as big of a legal risk as the police department experts say. . . .

A partial victory for gun ownership in DC.

The District has moved one step closer to showing due respect to the Second Amendment. Potential gun owners will now save hours of their time and hundreds of dollars as a council committee voted to eliminate hurdles meant to discourage the law-abiding from keeping arms in the nation’s capital.

The newly-drafted legislation eliminates the five-hour training requirement for gun ownership. As documented in The Washington Times’ “Emily Gets Her Gun” series, this turned out to be the most time-consuming and expensive barrier. The classes, which cost an average of $200, could not even be legally taken within city limits, calling into question the requirement’s constitutionality.

Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Cathy Lanier asked the council to end the mandatory classes. She told The Washington Times that her department will instead provide a video online or at the registry office that covers gun safety and local laws. “I think it makes sense,” she explained. “We’ll be more consistent with what other jurisdictions do.” . . .

Her archives are available here.

From the Washington Times:

D.C. officials will do just about anything to keep law-abiding citizens from lawfully possessing a gun in the city. The Washington Times’ Emily Miller has found in the “Emily Gets Her Gun” series that the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has been spreading false information about firearms ownership. As a result, residents and nonresidents who have done nothing wrong risk false arrest and gun confiscation. As of Friday, the MPD's Firearms Registration Office had not removed the incorrect information from its website.

The registry office supplies a 22-page written guide to prospective gun owners and answers their questions over the phone. The registration packet says that a gun can only be outside the home when “traveling directly to or from a lawful firearm-related activity (registration, hunting, shooting at a practice range, etc.).” This is inaccurate; residents can transport their registered handgun for any legal purpose as long as it is properly stored in their vehicle. The word “directly” is the source of false interpretation by the department, which has been advising the public that a D.C. resident taking his pistol to a shooting range in Maryland or Virginia could not legally stop for gas or for lunch.

Asked about this, D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson told The Washington Times, “They’re just making stuff up.” . . . .

DC doesn't make it easy to get the training to get guns. The list has gradually got more out of date, making it progressively more difficult for people meet DC's rules for getting a handgun permit.

The Washington Times’ Emily Miller has been closely documenting each step required in the process of exercising her Second Amendment right to keep arms. One of these is the mandatory gun “safety” course consisting of four hours of classroom instruction and one hour on the shooting range. For this, the city hands prospective gun owners a long list of instructors who have been certified by the Metropolitan Police Department to teach the class.

As Miss Miller revealed, this sheet of 47 phone numbers hadn’t been updated since September 2009. The majority were cellphones that went directly to voicemail when called, seven lines were out of service, two said they don’t teach the course anymore and one teaches the class only in Colorado and Georgia.

Within a month after Miss Miller’s story appeared, the registry office quietly posted an updated list of instructors online. The new document included Donna Worthy, an instructor who had been trying without success to get on the list for two years, along with another 15 new instructors. The police also deleted 14 obsolete names, undoubtedly saving other residents from wasting time making dead-end calls. The city additionally updated the detailed list of firearms that it will allow residents to purchase. . . .

More problems are discussed here.

As part of the ongoing “Emily gets her gun” series, The Washington Times’ Emily Miller has documented each step in the convoluted process the council concocted to thwart legal gun ownership. One of the most obnoxious hurdles she has found so far is the requirement that prospective gun owners undertake four hours of classroom and one hour of range “safety” training. As Mr. Mendelson explained to his colleagues Tuesday, “That training can’t be offered in the District of Columbia because our law is such that in order to handle a gun, it has to be registered to you. But you can’t register the gun until you’ve had the training.”

To break out of the difficulty, Mr. Mendelson proposes to clarify that the shooting portion of the training could happen within the city limits. In addition, he’d specify that individuals don’t need to take the test for each gun they purchase and that military personnel with firearms training wouldn’t have to waste their time taking a D.C.-specific class. Ballistic testing of each gun would also be eliminated.

These are all sensible steps in the right direction, but more must be done to reverse the District’s revival of the despicable Jim Crow-era gun laws.

Following the Civil War, many Southern states required blacks to obtain police permission before they could own guns - which, of course, was never granted. Ratification of the 14th Amendment forced officials to be a bit more subtle with their racially motivated laws. So in 1871, Tennessee came up with “An Act to Preserve the Peace and Prevent Homicide” that made carrying anything but expensive military pistols a crime punishable by a $50 fine and three months in jail. The statute put the price of self-defense beyond the reach of most blacks, and it even included an instruction to local sheriffs that its provisions be “strictly enforced.” . . .

UPDATE: Some things to remember about the debate over gun registration from 2009.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, announced last week that she wants to register guns. Her next move will be to try to confiscate them.
The speaker picked a television show with a viewership of 4.6 million to float the Democrats' coming gun-control push. Questioned on ABC's “Good Morning America” about the prospect of new gun-control laws now that “it's a Democratic president, a Democratic House,” she responded, “We don't want to take their guns away. We want them registered.” 

Politicians and bureaucrats routinely claim that registration helps solve crimes. If a registered gun is used in a crime and left at the crime scene, registration supposedly lets the police trace the gun back to the criminal. Though this turn of events might work on fictional TV crime shows, it virtually never occurs in real life. Criminals' guns are rarely left at crime scenes. When guns are left behind, it usually is because a crook has been seriously injured or killed and the police are poised to catch him anyway. 

The few guns left at crime scenes rarely - if ever - are registered to the perpetrator. If they are registered at all, it is to someone else, whose piece was stolen. Despite what Mrs. Pelosi might think, those who use guns to commit major crimes such as robbing and killing are unlikely to respect her request to file paperwork so the government can catalog the tools of their trade. . . . 

Crime down after Supreme Court overturns city gun bans

What about the claim that accidental gun injuries are rising? Despite the claim, I think that it is very hard for anyone to say that accidental gun injuries have been rising. Indeed, the general trend has been clearly downward.














Well, gun injuries are not very well tracked, but accidental gun deaths are falling.






Just a note on the claim that 30,000 people die each year from guns.

Latest numbers
8,775 firearms 2010
554 accidents 2009
18,735 suicides 2009
Total: 28,064

percent suicides: 67%

Even those few studies that say that gun bans reduce gun suicides don't find that they change total suicides.

Some nutty comments on the Fox News piece by Media Matters. Media Matters doesn't seem to understand that you can get some benefit from loosening gun control laws and still want to loosen them even more to get more benefits. I know that it is a deep concept for Media Matters. One big benefit from the Supreme Court decision is that over 70,000 DC residents who have registered long guns could now use them for self defense.

DC reluctantly moves to remove some gun control laws

From the Washington Times:

A bill that cuts training sessions and other impediments to registering a gun in the District is expected to pass, perhaps unanimously, when it goes before the entire D.C. Council in coming weeks.

But its auspicious path to law is peculiar in one respect - city lawmakers may not oppose the measure, but they aren’t about to sing its praises or say much about it at all, even if restrictive gun laws in the District were the subject of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case and loomed large in a recent pitch for D.C. statehood.

Council member Phil Mendelson, at-large Democrat, introduced the Firearms Amendment Act of 2012 to fix stumbling blocks that made it difficult for residents to meet pre-registration requirements within the city’s borders. Even as the bill heads to the council’s agenda on Tuesday, Mr. Mendelson noted his colleagues may not have delved into the subject - it is viewed as highly technical - as much as gun advocates outside of the John A. Wilson Building.

“It’s not so much they don’t have experience in relaxing gun laws,” he said Thursday. “The council doesn’t have experience with it at all.”

The Committee on the Judiciary, of which Mr. Mendelson is chairman, forwarded the bill to the full council on Wednesday with a 3-0 vote of approval, noting the reforms do not eliminate the District’s tough registration laws or its ban on automatic weapons. . . .

DC's phony crime closure rates

This is one way to increase the closure rate. Put solved cases from many years in the numerator and only this year's cases in the denominator. From the Washington Post:

For the past two months, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has touted the city’s astronomically high homicide closure rate — 94 percent for 2011 — and warned anyone contemplating murder in the District to think twice.

“Your risk of being caught is pretty high if you commit a homicide in D.C.,” Lanier told The Washington Post in December.

The closure rate she presents for the District is 154 percent higher than Boston’s and at least 104 percent higher than Baltimore’s, and it gives residents reason to believe that D.C. police have been remarkably successful at solving homicide cases under her watch.

But an examination of District homicides found that the department’s closure rate is a statistical mishmash that makes things seem much better than they are. The District had 108 homicides last year, police records show. A 94 percent closure rate would mean that detectives solved 102 of them. But only 62 were solved as of year’s end, for a true closure rate of 57 percent, according to records reviewed by The Post.

D.C. police achieved the high closure rate last year by including about 40 cases from other years that were closed in 2011. . . .

"D.C. Ordered to Pay $1M in Historic Gun Case"

Alan Gottlieb was asking for $3.1 million, but it is nice to see that they got some of their costs covered.  It is too bad that Alan Gura and others aren't getting more compensation for their hard work.  From Fox News:

The District of Columbia has been ordered to pay more than $1 million in attorneys' fees as a result of a historic gun case that was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dick Heller sued the city in 2003 over its ban on handgun ownership and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban in June 2008, saying it violated the Second Amendment.
A federal judge on Thursday issued an opinion awarding Heller's attorneys $1,137,072.27 in fees and expenses. The attorneys had argued they should be awarded $3.1 million. Attorneys for the city said the figure should be closer to $840,000.
A spokesman for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General said city lawyers were studying the opinion. A telephone message left for Heller's lead lawyer, Alan Gura, wasn't immediately returned. The judge's opinion awards Gura approximately $662,000 for more than 1,500 hours of work on the case, paying him at a rate of $420 per hour. Five other members of Heller's team are also compensated. . . .

So what happened to Chicago's Murder and Violent Crime rates after the Supreme Court decision in June 2010 striking down Chicago's gun laws?

In DC, the change in gunlock laws as a result of the Supreme Court decision meant that about a third of adults already had registered long guns that they were now allowed to legally load and fire for self defense.  In Chicago, very few new guns have been allowed and that gun ownership is essentially restricted to relatively well to do areas (see below).  Yet it is the poorest parts of the city where crime is the worst and where people need guns the most for self protection.  One would thus expect a much bigger change in crime rates from the Heller than the McDonald decisions.  Still, for Chicago, the change in the law has not had the bad effect that many had predicted.



This data is available here. Since murder and other crime rates vary over the course of the year, it is important to compare the same months in 2010 and 2011. Data for other months is available here. I had some discussion on the data for the last half of last year here.

A discussion on what happened in DC after the Heller decision is available here (also here).




Predictions:

District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty had his own prediction: "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence."

Or this:

Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley predicted disaster. He said that overturning the gun ban was "a very frightening decision" and predicted more deaths along with Wild West-style shootouts and that people "are going to take a gun and they are going to end their lives in a family dispute." . . .

Crime was a central concern among the dissenters in the Heller case.

If a resident has a handgun in the home that he can use for self- defense, then he has a handgun in the home that he can use to commit suicide or engage in acts of domestic violence. If it is indeed the case, as the District believes, that the number of guns contributes to the number of gun- related crimes, accidents, and deaths, then, although there may be less restrictive, less effective substitutes for an outright ban, there is no less restrictive equivalent of an outright ban. . . . In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas.
—Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting in District of Columbia v. Heller, June 26, 2008

The possible harm from guns was central to his dissent, and the words “crime,” “criminal,” “criminologist,” “homicide,” “murder,” “rape,” “robbery,” "suicide," and “victim” were used a total of 122 times in forty-four pages.

I like this justification by then Mayor Daley about his request for five round the clock armed police bodyguards for after he retires:

"The safety of my family comes first,” said Daley, who leaves office on May 16. “I’ve been mayor for 22 years, and my wife has made a commitment [to the city]. … Former mayors received security appropriately. … It’s appropriate for every former mayor. Yes, it’s always appropriate.”

A couple follow up articles on who gets handguns in Chicago http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-gun-registration/Content?oid=4066384">here. From Mick Dumke's article in the Chicago Reader:

John Lott, an economist who argues that gun control laws like Chicago's actually lead to higher crime, says the cost of meeting the gun application's training and registration requirements essentially discriminates against low-income black communities. In Chicago, the training and permit fees cost about $250 on top of the price of the gun.

"Those who are most likely to be victims of crime benefit the most from owning guns, and unfortunately, that is one very well defined group in our country, poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas such as Chicago," Lott wrote in an e-mail. "But these white, middle class areas can much more easily afford the fees to register their guns and to go through the training requirements."

Roderick Sawyer, alderman of the Sixth Ward, is skeptical of that theory. "It's like buying a car," he says. "If you want one you'll find a way to do it." . . .

UPDATE: Here are the crime data for Chicago in 2011.

Faced with a certain loss in a lawsuit, DC "may" allow its single registered gun dealer to start operations again

For several months now, law-abiding citizens have been unable to buy guns in DC and they aren't allowed to buy them outside the city. The single registered gun dealer was out of business. I can't think of any obvious reason why that restriction on where law-abiding citizens can buy guns would reduce crime. Wouldn't it serve the city right if someone who had been trying to get a permit had a crime committed against them while they were in limbo with no ability to defend themselves? Of course, no one would wish that result on anyone.

D.C. hopes to dodge a legal bullet by allowing its only licensed gun dealer to operate out of police headquarters.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the city’s handgun ban in 2008, residents have been allowed to buy guns in other jurisdictions to keep in their D.C. homes, but it’s against the law for them to bring guns in themselves. They must transfer the guns to the District through a licensed gun dealer. That’s Charles Sykes, and his shop’s been closed for several months because he lost his lease.

With no dealer operating in town, D.C. was in legal trouble again. Three residents sued, saying their right to bear arms was being violated again.

Emergency legislation that would have allowed the city to operate as a gun dealer temporarily was pulled last week, but the city may have a new solution. The city will permit Sykes to use space at the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, Mayor Vincent Gray said Wednesday. He'll be allowed to set up shop in the tight security offices where guns are registered.

"It seemed to make sense to us to locate close to MPD's firearms registration office at police headquarters on Indiana Avenue, where anyone purchasing a firearm must come anyway to register their guns," Gray said. . . .

Where is the ACLU in Chicago and DC gun fee cases?

The ACLU in Missouri is suing to stop a proposal that would require voter IDs. One of their arguments is that even though the IDs are given out for free initially, eventually people will be required to buy one. The ACLU states that this requirement for the law would "disenfranchise impoverished voters." Yet, the fee for these IDs that they eventually will have to get is small compared to the fees required to register handguns in Chicago or DC. So if the ACLU believes their claim about the voter IDs, why isn't the ACLU trying to protect "impoverished" citizens who are being denied their ability to defend themselves and their families in those cities?

By the way, since the voter IDs are initially given out for free, it seems like it will be years before there will be standing to bring this part of the ACLU case.

"Shot down: D.C. residents unable to register handguns"

This should bring a quick suit against DC.

The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee says the D.C. government should step in to help residents of the nation's capital make legal gun purchases --something they can't do now, even though the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the city's ban on handguns nearly three years ago.

"The city government of Washington, D.C. has a responsibility to make sure that every resident of D.C. can exercise their constitutional rights. And one of those constitutional rights is the individual to have a right to bear arms," Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told WTOP.

Grassley, after learning there's a de facto gun ban in place because the one man who could facilitate handgun ownership in Washington has stopped taking registration orders after losing his office lease, said the D.C. government needs to take action.

He says it's "absolutely wrong" that D.C. residents currently can't buy a gun legally and bring it home. . . .

Just a reminder about DC and Chicago's crime rate changes after the Supreme Court decisions

Note on DC and Chicago's crime rates after their Supreme Court decisions.

DC's murder and violent crime rates keep falling after their gunlock and gun ban laws were struck down

DC crime data is available here. For a discussion of what Chicago's Mayor Daley predicted would happen see here. My own argument for what has happened focuses most heavily on the Supreme Court striking down DC's gunlock law.

UPDATE: For a discussion on what happened to murder in Chicago after its ban ended see here.

Copies of briefs in Heller and McDonald cases

Just so it is handy here are sources for the Chicago handgun ban case is here.

The Heller case is here and here.