A blog covering our Second Amendment freedoms featuring Opinion Page Senior Editor Emily Miller. Follow her on Twitter @EmilyMiller
The city clearly takes possession of mace seriously because the penalty is the same for illegal possession of a firearm -- a whopping year in jail and $1,000 fine. Now I understand why Detective Kim assured me the cops wouldn’t arrest me if I used it. Read part two in the series as D.C. residents plead with politicians for the right to defend themselves with guns and mace.
Under pressure from Congress and the public, D.C. officials are moving to ease one of the least defensible of their anti-gun ordinances. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, also the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, held a hearing Monday on his proposal to decriminalize possession of a gun or ammunition for nonresidents.
When the Founders chose the swampy marshland along the Potomac River to serve as the home for the federal government, they couldn’t have envisioned it would one day become a cesspool of violence. While crime rates have steadily declined in the rest of the country, the trajectory in the District is up. Or maybe it’s down. It depends on whom you ask.
Now that I've registered a gun in Washington, I've realized how limiting it is for self defense since I can’t legally take it out of my home. Since the District do not recognize the constitutional right to bear arms, so residents are just sitting ducks on D.C. streets. Criminals know that they can rob, assault, rape or murder anyone without fear. D.C. politicians do everything in their power to keep people defenseless.
You didn’t hear the word “guns” voluntarily pass the lips of any Democratic speaker at this week’s convention in Charlotte, N.C. Liberals may be smart enough to avoid alienating the almost half of all Americans who have guns in their homes, but the same can’t be said for their party platform. That's because Democrats vow to pursue more gun-control laws.
Illinois is the only state in the country that denies all rights to carry arms. When I arrived there this week, however, I felt like I was free compared to the District. To get better at shooting, I took a ladies self-defense training course taught by Rob Pincus at the Winchester Company in the Prairie State.
I took my gun on a airplane for the first time, and it was much easier than getting it across town in Washington, D.C. The most difficult part of the process on Sunday was figuring out how to legally transport my firearm from my home in the District to Reagan National Airport in Virginia. The rest was -- surprisingly -- a breeze.
An unarmed security guard thwarted a gunman in Washington on Wednesday using nothing but his body - and that’s just what D.C. officials want. Mayor Vincent C. Gray cited Leonardo Johnson’s being shot in the arm while protecting coworkers at the Family Research Council as proof the capital city’s restrictive gun laws are effective. It’s dangerous to think unarmed guards are always going to be able to protect the innocent from determined criminals.
The Wednesday shooting of an unarmed security guard at the Family Research Council put the debate over the right to bear arms in the District of Columbia into the spotlight.I was interested to hear what D.C.’s most famous security guard, Dick Heller, thought of how the event could have been prevented and his take on the mayor’s comments about the city’s gun laws.
The shooting at the Family Research Council in Washington on Wednesday raised many questions about the guns laws in the District of Columbia. As people continued to tweet me questions, I decided to answer them all in one post.
Gun-control advocates have no shame. Before the bodies are buried or families have grieved, political opportunists exploit the tragic murder of innocent people to advance their cases. New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg uses his taxpayer-funded staff to jump all over a shooting anywhere in the country as a hook to call for more restrictions on Second Amendment rights.
Washington politicians are so anti-gun that they oppose a mere photo of a paper target. With D.C.’s gun-grabber laws under fire and pressure rising to allow concealed carry, the city’s liberal political establishment is panicking.
In the nation’s capital, it’s a fair question to ask: Who gets the better deal, innocent citizens who want to own a gun, or dangerous criminals? The District’s deliberate policy of releasing criminals back onto the streets shows the liberal city council’s answer has little to do with public safety.
Democrats just couldn’t hold it together. With less than 100 days to go before the election, the left let slip its vision of a second term for President Obama that will be the end for the Second Amendment.
Gun grabbers wasted no time exploiting Friday’s shooting in Aurora, Colo., by calling for more restrictive firearm laws. Their liberal agenda is off target because, with U.S. gun ownership at its highest level ever, the public sees crime is way down. This blows a hole in the left’s argument, but it doesn’t stop it.
