Reporter Sorta Concedes: DCs Nanny Gun Ban A Failure In Policy

First off, the title of the piece,

Effectiveness of D.C. gun ban still a mystery

And yet, that's not really that true, at least, that's not what I read.  It reads a bit like a concession once you get going.

The reporter starts out by noting that one of the first things DC did when it received the right to have a mayor and city council was enact their strict gun bans, the worst being a total ban on handguns.  The Globe asks the rhetorical question,

All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a US Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer?

So tell us, what were your findings?

Although studies through the decades have reached conflicting conclusions, this much is clear: The ban, passed with strong public support in 1976, has not accomplished everything the mayor and council of that era wanted it to.

Over the years, gun violence has continued to plague the city, reaching staggering levels at times.

Liberal to Standard American English translation:  Awwww....Goddammit, the wingnut gun guys were right.

In making by far their boldest public policy decision, Washington's first elected officials wanted other jurisdictions, especially neighboring states, to follow the lead of the nation's capital by enacting similar gun restrictions, cutting the flow of firearms into the city from surrounding areas. 

"We were trying to send out a message," recalled Sterling Tucker, the council chairman at the time.

Nadine Winters, also a council member then, said, "My expectation was that this being Washington, it would kind of spread to other places, because these guns, there were so many of them coming from Virginia and Maryland."

This may be shocking to the former members of the DC city council, some people in this country actually don't choke on the sweet, sweet air of liberty.  Difficult to wrap your head around, I know, but its true!

I like this line,

It didn't happen. Guns kept coming. And bodies kept falling.

 

Only a journalist or local newscaster could write that overwrought cornball line and think to themselves, magnifique!  You can almost see the douchebaggy local newscaster, with the oversprayed helmet of hair, he has his grave serious face on, reading it off his teleprompter...

Opponents of the ban, who won a March ruling in which the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared the law unconstitutional, said in a legal filing that the District's "31-year experiment with gun prohibition" has been a "complete failure."

They of course note that the other side says its stopped crimes committed with guns, and say that its up to social science studies to see what effect its had.  Then we get to this,

"It's a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you'll have," D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer said.

"One of the difficult things is, you can't measure what didn't happen," Singer said. "You can't measure how many guns didn't come into the District because we have this law."

So, our reporter looks at what has happened in the city since the ban was enacted. 

In 1977, the first full year of the ban, the city recorded 192 homicides. The total rose to 223 in 1981, then fell to 147 in 1985 - the lowest annual homicide toll in the District since 1966. At the time, the rate for the country also was trending down.

I wonder if our reporter sought out the homicide rates before the ban took place.  Whatever, this is a good start, his head might have exploded if he experienced that much truth in one dose.  Or maybe he did and


He couldn't handle the truth!

Anyway, before you go,  Hey! That shows a downward trend....

Which turned out to be the calm before the slaughter.

Hee.  I love this guy, he's a reporter for a major paper, but he throws in corny lines like he's still writing for a local newscast. 

The advent of the crack market and the unprecedented street violence it unleashed nationwide sent homicide rates soaring in the latter half of the 1980s. Not only did the number of killings surge in the District, the homicide rates here also far exceeded the rates in crack-ridden cities where handguns had not been banned.

Bitch set me up!

Even the mayor of DC was a crackhead.  And note, in between goofing on the Mayor of the District of Crackheads, that he notes that DC had a much higher rate of homicide than other cities without gun bans. 

In the peak year, 1991, the District reported 482 homicides.

A period of turbulence in a city where people have no means to defend themselves, and the yearly number of murders skyrockets?  No kidding.

Almost as sharply as violence in the District increased, it declined through the 1990s, a drop researchers attributed to the burning out and aging of a generation of crack dealers and users. Again, the shift reflected national trends.

Sounds like a case of

Yet the gun culture on the city's mean streets during the crack epidemic has not abated, police statistics show. Even as the homicide toll declined in D.C. after 1991, the percentage of killings committed with firearms remained far higher than it was when the ban was passed.

Guns were used in 63 percent of the city's 188 slayings in 1976. Last year, out of 169 homicides, 81 percent were shootings.

In other words, people inclined toward a life of crime learned that guns are a pretty effective way to get what you want, and because the leftist Nannies that run DC forced all the law-abiding citizens to beat their swords into plowshares, criminals own the swords and own the streets. 

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