The District of Columbia was a shall-issue jurisdiction well before the Bruen decision, but no one should read much into that. That only happened because of a federal court ruling that the district opted to accept rather than change a ruling at the Supreme Court that would undermine gun control efforts throughout the nation.
Of course, they only delayed the inevitable as we now know, but bless their hearts for trying, and I mean that in the southern sense of the phrase.
The district has plenty of gun control on the books, though. Despite a number of court cases, they have held onto a lot of anti-gun rules.
And, it seems, those laws aren’t accomplishing all that much.
Gun-controlled, Democrat-run Washington, DC, is witnessing a surge in murders that is putting it on pace to record its deadliest year in two decades.
Three homicides over the weekend brought the city’s total for this year to 161, which represents “a 28 percent increase over this time in 2022,” the Washington Post noted.
Jamila White chairs the Advisory Neighborhood Commission for the area in which the latest three murders occurred and claims city officials are not responding to the commission’s suggestions on how to fix things.
White said, “Our voices and our solutions are not being acted upon. The community has been doing what it can. The community is in survival mode.”
It should be noted that while we had a huge spike in homicides in 2020, the trend since then has seen declines in the homicide rate.
For DC to be seeing its highest homicide rate in nearly 30 years, more is going on than just the district following a general trend.
And let’s be clear, all that gun control is supposed to prevent this thing.
DC has gun registration, universal background checks, assault weapon bans, magazine capacity restrictions, waiting periods for gun purchases, and red flag laws.
These are all things we’re told we need on the national level if we want to reduce violent crime, yet it doesn’t seem to be doing all that much in our nation’s capital.
Why is that?
Well, not that anyone reading this doesn’t already know the answer, but the issue is that criminals don’t obey laws. It’s kind of part of the job description, after all, so no one should be surprised that they break the law.
As a result, they constantly look at how to go around the legal barriers put in place in order to obtain firearms. Sometimes they steal them, sometimes they buy them on the black market–many of which are stolen, too, but are sometimes brought in from well outside the area.
So all the rules put in place in DC do nothing to stop criminals. It doesn’t even really seem to slow them down. Instead, it just throws up barriers for your regular citizen who wants to own a gun. They have to go through the whole rigamarole to just buy a gun, taking as many as 90 days to buy a gun and have the relevant permits required to own it.
Meanwhile, the guys carrying out these shootings in DC? They’re going to that guy down the street who has a box of guns cleverly hidden under his bed and that doesn’t ask a lot of questions beyond, “Do you have the money?”
This is why gun control isn’t going to work. It’s never going to work.
All it will ever do is inhibit what you or I can do while the criminals continue doing whatever they want. Especially since we also know that those same criminals are being coddled by the very people pushing gun control so vehemently.
