Al Sharpton "stunned" by his listeners' support of McDonald ruling.

“Sensible Gun Control”

…consider a city with “reasonable,” “common sense” gun laws.{49} The District of Columbia's laws earn high grades from the Brady Campaign, and they approach {Obama’s} total urban gun bans.

It is a crime in the District of Columbia to have a gun in your home that can actually shoot bullets. Guns are ok, as long as they are useless. In order to ensure their uselessness, they must always be unloaded. In order to be doubly sure, they must always be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Making a gun useful by assembling (or unlocking) and loading it is a crime. The excuse that you are trying to protect your family—or repel a rapist or avoid death—will not do.

When confronted with this reality, the District tried to argue that they don't really mean it. They tried to convince the Supreme Court in Heller that there is an exception for self-defense.



The problem is that they met and defeated that very defense in McIntosh v. Washington.{51} It is illegal to load a gun in your home for self-defense. Period. Defending your business with a functional gun is legal.

These are the laws regarding long guns—rifles and shotguns. The situation with handguns is even worse. You cannot possess a handgun that you did not register before Sept 1976. Even if you have a registered handgun, you need a special permit to move it from room to room in your own house. Permits are impossible to get.{52} And of course your registered handgun must remain useless at all times. (You may load guns kept at your place of business.)


These “reasonable,” “common sense" laws—carefully designed to prevent gun crimes, self-inflicted wounds, and armed toddlers—caused Parker (the lead litigant in the original DC case, the precursor to Heller) distress. A community activist, her outspoken opposition to drugs earned the enmity of a local dealer, who threatened to kill her.

She should depend on the police, says the common wisdom. They are professionals, pledged to serve and protect. Less known is the fact that they have no obligation to do either, as established in court:



To summarize, the District's position is that you must pay taxes for police who have no duty to protect you.{54} You may possess long guns, but they must always be kept in a useless condition, even when you are under attack. To meet Heller’s legal challenge, the District now maintains that there is a self-defense exception—a position they have previously defeated in court. Under this newly adopted position, a person under immediate attack is allowed to assemble or unlock their weapon and load it. D.C. desires that the Supreme Court should not address this “reasonable” law, still on the books, nor the legal precedent set by the District‟s victory, but should take the District at its word on its future enforcement.

So let's take them at their word (for the sake of discussion only).

A law-abiding woman lives alone. She keeps a long gun as allowed in the District. At 2:00 AM, a drug dealer breaks into her house and the race starts. She must awaken from a dead sleep, remove the lock (or assemble the gun!), retrieve the ammunition, load the gun, and bring it into position in time to protect herself.

Absent Special Forces training, this is a very tall order.

Posted by no limit

"Can you give me some examples of this happening recently?"

Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Art. I, § 22

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps.... (T)he Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population.... (I)t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute.... (T)here has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested. Watson v. Stone, 4 So.2d 700, 703 (Fla. 1941).

"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. "

Fifty-six percent of the violent felons convicted in the 75 most populous counties from 1990 through 2002 had a prior conviction, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Of the offenders with prior felony records, the study found that at the time of the new crime 18 percent were on probation, 12 percent on release pending disposition of a prior case and 7 percent on parole.

The bureau also reported 38 percent had a prior felony conviction and 15 percent had been previously convicted for a violent felony.

In another finding, the bureau said youths under age 21 commit 30 percent of all homicides.