EDITORIAL: Post- and pre-1976 gun ban

With the Supreme Court’s abolishment of the D.C. handgun ban it is important to look at where the District and other jurisdictions go from here and how local and national politics and scandals aided in the ban lasting as long as it did.

The D.C. Council is scheduled to hold its first hearing tomorrow to review the District’s gun laws to determine how they should be altered and what restrictions can be kept in place.

Lawyers with the National Rifle Association filed lawsuits Friday and yesterday in several Illinois jurisdictions, including Chicago, Evanston, Oak Park and Marion Grove. The NRA also filed suit in San Francisco. While the various gun bans in Illinois mirrored the District’s, San Francisco was perhaps the most egregious - a class discriminatory law which prevented anyone living in public housing, in other words the poor, from having a gun.

Given the District’s history with the law it is unlikely that residents will be allowed to carry weapons in public but cannot be denied the right to keep a gun in the home. Since the first council banned handguns in 1976, the law has been an anathema to defenders of the Second Amendment. It wasn’t until Carl T. Rowan Sr., a staunch supporter of the ban, shot teenage-trespassing-swimmer Neil Smith on the evening of June 14, 1988, that D.C. residents really began to question the ban’s usefulness. Mr. Rowan was one of the most prominent black journalists of the 20th century, and he advocated for a federal law “that says anyone found in possession of a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail - period.” Yet, ultimately, a 1989 jury found him not guilty of shooting the trespasser. Jurors noted that it should be Mr. Rowan’s right to defend his home and property with a gun.

The gun ban also persevered through numerous federal distractions. In 1990, Mayor Marion Barry was arrested in an FBI narcotics sting, Congress was removing House Speaker Jim Wright for corruption, and several postal employees and two House members were suspected in a money-laundering scheme. If that weren’t enough, President Clinton’s assault-weapons ban passed in 1994, pushing the D.C. handgun ban completely off the radar.

D.C. lawmakers must be prudent: Move too slowly and there could be a legal backlash; move recklessly and the bureaucracy ensnares law-abiding citizens. Mostly, though, all D.C. has to do is reinstitute handgun laws and regulations that were on the books prior to 1976 ban.