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Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer apparently needs a Valium, a stiff drink or maybe a couple of hits of Colorado’s newest tax revenue bonanza. Something to calm her palpitations at the thought of peasants carrying guns in the District. The title of her piece Anyone With a Concealed Carry Permit Can Now Come Dangerously Close to the White House indicates just how overwrought Steph has become. She doesn’t even manage to get through the first paragraph before the lies start . . .

A federal judge has ordered the District of Columbia to stop enforcing its restrictions on carrying handguns on the streets of the nation’s capital. The decision also forced the District government to allow out-of-state concealed carry and open carry permit holders to wield their weapons within steps of the White House.

Umm, not exactly Steph. From Merriam-Webster we get:

wield (verb): to hold (something, such as a tool or weapon) in your hands so that you are ready to use it

Go ahead and “wield” your “weapon” within 75 yards of the White House sometime and see how long it takes the Secret Service to drop you. And that 75 yard figure wasn’t plucked from thin air; that is (as best I can tell from Google maps and my micrometer) the closest you can get to the White House without jumping the fence (hardly “within steps of the White House”). Of course with the landscaping and strategically placed shrubbery you can’t actually see anything from ground level, but I’ll bet the snipers on the roof would have a really good view of you through the crosshairs as you “wield” your pistol. However briefly.

The potential implications of the decision are enormous, should it be allowed to stand. The District of Columbia is unlike any other American city. It’s filled with important federal agency buildings, monuments, courthouses, not to mention the White House. Visiting dignitaries, heads of state, and many members of Congress travel its streets on a daily basis.

And your point is . . . what exactly? The District certainly is filled with VIPs and other high muckety-mucks, but please explain to me how you think a credible would-be assassin would find his mission simplified by the ability to open carry a pistol? You somehow missed the fact that there’s another way that the District is unlike ‘other’ American cities. It has some of the highest violent crime rates in the country (behind Puerto Rico which, oddly enough, also has a virtual ban on privately owned firearms).

DC is also home to large public events attended by all manner of VIPs, including presidential inaugurations, which are difficult enough to secure without the prospect of gun-toting citizens joining the fray.

I imagine that security forces will do what they did at the GOP’s National Convention 2008 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; they will completely ignore local laws and the inconvenient parts Bill of Rights like the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Steph continues:

The security apparatus in DC is intense. And assassination attempts aren’t unheard of. Former Mayor Marion Barry Jr. was shot in 1977 in the DC Council building. John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton. There was also the 2013 Navy Yard shooting that left 12 people dead. DC is a magnet for crazy people with guns, something law enforcement officials have long recognized.

Wait, you mean DC’s draconian gun laws were completely ineffective in halting these assassination attempts and mass shootings? Quelle shock! And again, how can DC be “a magnet for crazy people with guns” if guns are already banned there?

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier testified before Congress in 2008 … She noted that in order to watch the oral arguments in the Heller case, she had to leave her gun behind. No weapons are allowed inside the very building where the justices decided that the city’s gun restrictions were just too restrictive.

That shoe sure pinches when it’s on the other foot, doesn’t it?

Many of those type of restrictions in DC will remain in place, regardless of Scullin’s ruling. …

So what is the problem? Does the possibility of the average law-abiding citizen being able to exercise their natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil and Constitutional right to carry the most effective self-defense tool in existence frighten you that much?

Even so, the ruling, which took effect almost immediately, could put a lot more guns into a city that’s spent untold millions trying to secure and defend against terrorist and other public safety threats.

And what a bang-up job they’ve done so far! According to the FBI’s 2012 Uniform Crime Report, the District has a violent crime rate that was 3.2 times the national average. So why in G0d’s name are you trying to keep the average law-abiding working Joes and Janes defenseless? Oh wait, Steph has an answer to that:

The Violence Policy Center has been keeping a running tally of all the people in the US who’ve been killed by people legally carrying a concealed weapon. Since 2007, that figure has reached 644, and it includes 14 law enforcement officers. Fewer than 20 of those deaths were deemed lawful self-defense.

Clayton Cramer did an excellent job debunking that garbage in 2012 and Dr. John Lott has a more recent dissection available here. Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s assume for the moment that the numbers are valid, but remove the 186 suicides, giving us 458 people ‘killed by permit holders’ between May 2007 and June 2014. 458 divided by 85 months times 12 gives us an annual average of 65 CCKs[2].

According to NBC News, in June of 2010 there were 6 million permit holders in the US. Today that figure is over 11 million. So let’s go conservative and say that there was an average of 6 million permit-holders each year between 2007 and today. So 65 CCKs divided by 6 million CCWs gives us a rate of 1.1 CCKs per 100,000 permit holders. According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 there were an estimated 309 million people in the US and 26.9% of those were under 20, leaving 226 million[3]. Going back to the UCR we see that in 2010 there were 14,722 murders. So 14,722 murders divided by 226 million gives us a rate of 6.5 murders per 100,000 or almost six times the rate of supposed murderous permit-holders.

So Steph, tell me one more time why you want to continue to abrogate the natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil and Constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to own and carry the most effective self-defense tool in existence. Please?

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71 COMMENTS

    • Stephanie Mencimer, please understand that in 2010 Washington DC had TWENTY SEVEN times more murders than the slightly larger city of El Paso, Texas. Please also understand that in El Paso every responsible, adult citizen can carry a LOADED, CONCEALED HANDGUN on her person as she goes about her day. Perhaps, just perhaps, El Paso’s murder rate is so low because of the LACK of gun control laws. Source: FBI Crime Report

  1. A bit off topic but doesn’t anyone remember the guy that slammed a PLANE into the White House? Happened in the mid-90s. I bring this up given that Mother Jones is going on about the fact that someone might have the legal ability have a weapon close to the WH… My point being that legally carried handguns aren’t nearly the problem these pin heads are trying to make them out to me.

    • As I remember it a piper cub was landed on the lawn of the W/H. Maybe that’s where the idea of weaponizing commercial flights came from.

      • Ahh, yeah. Got me there. The plane didn’t actually hit the building. Even so I still point to the fact that a dedicated crazy doesn’t need to go through the process of getting a CCW, weapon training, and a legally purchased firearm to do an illegal act.

        • Actually it was a little Cessna 150 in the mid 90’s, about the size of a Piper Cub but with tricycle landing gear (nose wheel) rather than a tail dragger (tail wheel).

          I’m still amused by all the hysteria that caused.

          A little C-150 a weapon; laugh. The odds of targeting a point of impact that would cause any real concern are pretty slim. If he had full fuel and ignition at point of impact, there could have been some fire damage, but that’s about it. Catastrophic; yeah, for the pilot.

        • More here:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_150
          http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/WhiteHouse_Corder.htm

          The big deal was that the SS at the time never expected someone to actually violate airspace restrictions and fly into the White House.

          A seasoned, skilled pilot might have managed a short field soft field landing on the WH lawn at that time with luck and the right approach conditions – if he didn’t get tangled in wires or other obstructions – but not this ‘pilot’ wanna be.

      • On Sunday, September 11, 1994, Frank Corder stole a Cessna 150, registered as N1405Q from Aldino Airport in Churchville, Maryland.

        Oh, he was drunk and stoned.

        http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/WhiteHouse_Corder.htm

        ” Then, at 1:44 AM, the tower at National Airport began receiving radar signals that showed that Corder was flying at an altitude of 2700 feet, about six and a half miles north of the White House. Corder then started to descend, dropping a thousand feet in altitude over the span of three minutes. Then, the plane resumed a southbound course, passing over Washington Circle, and violating the P-56 prohibited airspace at 1:48 AM, flying towards the National Mall and continuing to descend.

        Then, the plane passed over the Ellipse, located south of the White House, and dove directly towards the Executive Mansion at a steep angle of descent. A minute later, with the flaps up and the throttle fully forward, the plane plowed into the White House’s South Lawn, skidding across the ground and its left wing was clipped by the magnolia tree just west of the South Portico steps (which was planted during Andrew Jackson’s presidency), and impacted the southwest corner of the first floor of the Mansion’s West Wing.”

        Splat, and that, was that.

        I suspect nowadays you would be blasted out of the sky of Washington before you got near Casa Blanco.

        The Russians got humiliated by 18 years young Mathias Rust on May 28, 1987.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

        His rented Cessna 172 departed Helsinki, Finland and landed in Moscow’s Red Square on a bridge by St. Basil’s Cathedral.

        That earned him a stay in prison until August 1988, and caused the biggest purge in the Russian Air De fence in 50 years.

        Interestingly enough, in 1994,the same year Frank Corder crashed the C-150 into the White House grounds, Tom Clancy wrote the Jack Ryan thriller “Debt of Honor” that ended with a character crashing a Boeing 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol during a special joint session of Congress, killing the President, most of Congress and SCOTUS. In the book, the character of Jack Ryan had just been sworn in as VP. Leaving now President Ryan for the next books in the series.

        A weaponized airliner, indeed.

        • Yeah, that Soviet airspace cross country intrusion was amusing too. The Soviets were REAL red faced over that one.

        • Wait. Are you telling me that making the airspace around the White House ‘restricted’ doesn’t actually keep people from flying airplanes into it? Does that mean that a ‘No Guns’ sign doesn’t automatically prevent somebody from carrying a gun past it?

          I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover that Security Theatre doesn’t really count for anything. . .

        • So lemme get this straight. A lot of Gorbachev’s reforms to the Soviet system are what caused it to blow up in his face in the end. And it turns out that a major roadblock to his reforms were members of the Soviet military. But because of this Rust guy, the Soviet military’s reputation was damaged and thus Gorbachev was able to implement many of his reforms, which helped blow up the system.

          So essentially, a major contributor to ending the Cold War ultimately was an eighteen year-old pilot who just randomly decided to fly into the Soviet Union? 😀

          Apparently he is a bit nutty too, having stabbed a female coworker for rejecting him (which got him some time in prison), converting to Hinduisim to marry some Indian girl, and so forth. I wonder how he has managed to make a living all these years?

  2. “the closest you can get to the White House without jumping the fence”

    Funny, Barry doesn’t believe in a boarder fence, but their using one around the out house.

  3. People like this have an irrational fear of guns. You can see it in their speaking and writing. The hypotheticals that keep them up at night are often absurd.

    I love talking with people like this. Absolutely love it. I seek them out.

    You should see their reaction when they meet us (my wife and I) in social settings and they ask “What do you do?”

    “I’m a gunsmith.” (I smile, with a twinkle in my eye)

    “A… what?… um? What’s that?”

    “I work on guns. I repair, maintain, adjust and make guns.” And then I smile again. I try to restrain myself from grinning like a jackal. My “management” is usually jabbing me in the ribs at this point, saying “be niiiiice…”

    And I protest “But, honey, I am.”

    “No you’re not. You’re trying to give that poor woman a stroke.”

    “No, she’s doing that to herself.”

    The looks on their faces tell the real truth. There’s a whole lot of irrational fear going on in their heads. There’s a nightmare universe that’s a combination of “Escape from New York” and “Mad Max” that’s playing in their heads if people are able to legally possess guns.

    • Interesting is that what worries this dried up old babyboomer is a weapons within steps of the White House Not the steps of Congress, the Pentagon, Langley ………………..

      Perhaps this libtard perceives some “dissatisfaction” with Dear Leader?

      • Laugh!

        “Perhaps” dissatisfaction you think? I’d have more confidence in that presumed animus amongst the commoners towards Democrat Obama.

        Luckily for the Prez, it’s mostly conservatives and Repub. types who are strong on exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, so he should be pretty safe, unless some crazed Democrat breaks outta the funny farm.

    • “If” because in their world nothing is a right and everything is illegal til made legal. I am always amazed at the mindset.

    • I sometimes have the same reaction whenever i tell people i’m a gunsmith. But i live in Kentucky, so the usual reaction is…

      “Oh! Hey, I have this old shotgun…”

      And out comes my business card.

      But every now and again I get one person who looks like i just told them I eat puppies for dinner and they just stammer on for a second, imagining me as this evil madman, building weapons of mass destruction in my shop and handing them out to school children. A few even start to get up enough courage to call me out on how horrid of a person i must be when their close, trusted, loved one suddenly says….

      “Oh! Hey, I have this old shotgun…”

      And out comes my business card.

  4. I see no compelling reason why the citizens in the capital should be rendered defenseless so the corrupt pols who ostensibly serve them can get that nice fuzzy false sense of security. They get bodyguards. Average citizens have to make it on their own.

  5. I guess she is fearful of taking the metro into the badlands of Northern Virginia. They allow the peasants to own and carry all sorts of weapons there. It isn’t VIP-less either with the presence of several heavy weight federal agencies like the Department of Defense and the CIA. The landscape is simply dotted with their facilities. Also many of the VIPs who work in DC live in Virginia. No wonder the bureaucracy has such a high turnover.

    • Oh, you mean that safe area around DC that I actually feel comfortable traveling in (and not just because of the 9mm tucked in my pants)?

  6. May I summarize her concerns? “OMG OMG OMG!!!! the peasants will be able to carry guns in the vicinity of the aristocrats!!”

    We can’t be having that kind of behavior on the part of the uppity commoners, now can we?

  7. My MI CPL expires next month. So thats nearly 5 years that I have carried a firearm in public and have not murdered a single person. I guess I’m not one of the crazys. Better not renew the permit. I think after a failed experiment of exercising my rights like a civil and sane individual I will take all my firearms to the police station and join everyclown for gun safety. Darn it, not fully cured of the gun nut bug yet. Maybe I can give it another 5 years. Or 50.

    • I have 16 yrs on a CCW and I must be defective – no one dead yet. I guess I have to work on that as an aspirational goal for 2015

    • I am shocked! shocked by your failure to live up to the expectations of the loony left! Keep that up and they will arrest you for hurting their feelings.

  8. Marion Barry bot shot because he didn’t pay up to a pimp or drug dealer. Par for the course if those are the type extracurriculars you participate in. In his case it wasn’t violence, it was business.

  9. This is pretty funny, in fact. If DC was really so important, they would make sure it didn’t have the homicide rate that it does.

  10. The closest walkway to the white house ATM is so far from the building and surrounded by armed officers. I think they would laugh as they shot me if I tried to shoot the white house from there.

  11. So, her argument is just the old “some animals are more equal than others” schtick? We simply cannot have legally-carried firearms near the hoity-toity of DC (but let’s completely ignore the thousands of weapons carried illegally by the city’s thugs and criminals*)? That’s a pretty weak-ass argument.

    * By “thugs and criminals”, I’m referring to the ones on the streets, not the ones in various federal office buildings.

  12. My fellow statist progressives! It is no longer safe for us in DC! We must flee to safer, gun controlled ground! Yes, this means we have to abandon our elected positions, policy think tanks, and organizing organizations, but we must not be caught in the New Wild West™ that will errupt in such a lawless gun violence situation. To not flee in the face of such evil would surely show us to be hypocrites and liars! More than usual, even!

  13. Also, from the article’s comments:

    “Ever notice that these states have the lowest collective IQ’s in the nation, which means that the people least likely to be able to settle differences with intelligent conversation are the ones most likely to settle them with munitions.”

    Ah, I see. “Collective” in this context would mean average. If MJ only panders to high IQ states, then everyone there is a genius, right? No issues that can’t be handled in a fern bar over a glass of merlot. And since we’re all smart, if I just explain my reasons long/often enough, you WILL agree. Because, after all, you’re smart…just like me.

  14. Somehow, I don’t believe the founding fathers made any allowances for people’s tender feelings when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

    • Well, see, that’s why the “progressives” want to “progress” beyond the Constitution. After all, the right to not be offended by differing conservative opinions is one of those most cherished by the left. Which explains why they are so eager to trash the First amendment as well as the Second.

  15. As long as the capital of our nation wages war on the American people by making them felons for such insane reasons as having a shell casing, I will never set foot there, and I will certainly never raise my hand to defend it either.

  16. So the crux of her whole argument is that this will allow people to carry a gun in public in DC, legally, and then they will do illegal things with the legally carried guns? Might, maybe, such people who are inclined to to illegal things with guns, also carry them into public, I L L E G A L L Y, regardless of the law?

    It’s like waiting to get your drivers licence and then going out and running down a bunch of people. Absurd.

    Clearly we aren’t breathing the same oxygen.

  17. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier testified before Congress in 2008 … She noted that in order to watch the oral arguments in the Heller case, she had to leave her gun behind. No weapons are allowed inside the very building where the justices decided that the city’s gun restrictions were just too restrictive.

    Try again, Stef. The Capitol (that’s the place with the dome where Cogress works) and the Supreme Court are two different buildings. In different locations, even. You can Google that if you’re not sure. Maybe BEFORE you submit your next article?

    Which leads me to wonder why her editor was falling-down, blind drunk when (s)he reviewed the article.

    • worse, she is a DC-based reporter . . . . she should know better. oh well, I guess writing an article over a cup of earl grey while the cat snuggles at your feet while you sit at your kitchen table passes for journalism these days

  18. Hey genius, if someone wants to try and kill the president they already can come close to the White House concealing a weapon; if theyvare planning murder I’m pretty sure that they don’t care one bit about CCW laws.

    I’m amazed that people like this reporter can tie their shoelaces without assistance.

  19. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce.
    Don’t go clearing up muddy waters with things like facts and truth.
    What are you thinking?
    (End sarc)

  20. Legally concealed handguns scare the big wigs in DC? I would have thought the pitchforks, torches and tar and feathers would have been a more immediate concern of the elected ones.

  21. Mr. Krafft, I am ever impressed by your skills at debunking the fallacious and false arguments of misguided antis. Well done.

  22. This she-twit works alongside David Korn…..for Mother Jones. Does anyone expect her to be anything other than a FUDD?

  23. I am a bit confused.THEY want universal background checks. All CCW holders are pretty well checked out. THEY then want to throw us back in and claim we are just like the unchecked dangerously close to the White house.
    So, we are dangerous whether we are “checked” or not.
    Am I getting that right?

  24. I still have a newspaper clipping from August 1993, depicting then-Senator Biden brandishing a Tec-9 at a Senate hearing on gun control. I guess that the District’s laws are for some people, but not the chosen few.

  25. So laws create magic force fields that keep gun wielding psychos out of D.C.? Oh really? Please go on and tell me about the rainbow farting unicorns that prance about the White House lawn while we are at it. Maybe she already sampled the goods in Colorado and just got back from her trip. Or maybe she is still on it.

  26. I am preaching to the choir, and apologize for pointing out the obvious- and this is for the benefit of those new to gun rights, maybe even someone on the fence, a reader coming here to TTAG from someplace like Mother Jones, perhaps a student, or college grad who has the intellectual integrity to seek out both sides to the news, so as not to become just another brainwashed, well-behaved, politically correct minion of the One True Progressive Agenda v2.0.

    Here is a simple thought experiment. If the total ban for 150 years on guns in DC failed to stop the shooters of President Reagan, Mayor Barry, and the innocents at the Navy Yard, then how will keeping that ban make politicians safer?

    How many innocent civilians, non-politician citizens, every day folks- have been victimized by gun-toting criminals? Why didnt the author point out DCs high crime rate- once known as the Murder Capitol of the US. Remember – when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. And that is no slam on the cops – you simply cant post one on every street corner.

    Here is a simple concept- so simple that you have to almost shake yourself to open your mind:
    Laws banning guns are not obeyed by criminals. Because, they are ….criminals.
    Banning guns for the law-abiding deprives them of their right to defend themselves from…criminals.

    Stephanie- you have all these awards for writing and journalism.
    http://www.motherjones.com/authors/stephanie-mencimer
    Congratulations.

    Either you are a genuinely smart person, despite your self-deprecating snark,
    and the sadly simple fact is you are deliberately obscuring these truths, above,
    in favor of Mother Jones obvious agenda, propaganda, really…

    OR,

    you aren’t so smart, and just following the herd. Which is it? Stephanie?

    How many of the well meaning readers of MJ, that you have misinformed, have you put at mortal risk?

    • …when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

      That’s only true in DC if you happen to call during the few times of the day or night when there’s no rush hour traffic, there’s no street work and the weather is good. I was once injured Downtown (Mass. Avenue) at 7:30 a.m. and it took an ambulance 45 minutes to go five blocks.

  27. Why do you think they were in such a hurry to get a stay on the court decision? They had to get all of the guns away from the good people before the crime rate dropped.

    Unfortunately we probably won’t see a measurable decrease in crime for the few days that DC was actually a part of the United States because nobody in DC had a carry gun, holster, or anything else that the rest of us have. Only tourists that followed the court decision closely and knew exactly when the window to liberty opened would have been carrying, and most of them are probably spending their time looking at landmarks that already don’t allow guns because they want to keep people “safe.”

    Even if I was following the situation closely, I would have hesitated to go to DC with my gun. When the window to liberty slammed shut with the stay decision, everyone in DC with a gun suddenly became a criminal.

  28. My prediction is that DC will end up with a carry permit law at least as restrictive as New York or Hawaii. A “may issue” policy that requires residents to show “good cause” for needing to carry, and no realistic cause will be good enough. Even if you do manage to demonstrate “good cause,” there will be hundreds of dollars in license fees, nearly impossible training requirements, and no reciprocity with any state.

    It will technically satisfy the requirement that there is a way to carry a gun in DC, but it will be the absolute minimum required to prevent a lawsuit.

  29. Does this wench even live in DC? All I want is parity with the criminal class that roves freely across the city. I just fail to understand the antis mindset. Do they support armed criminals because they are askeered of normal decent citizens being able to defend themselves and their loved ones? For Christ sake lady, go have an abortion, and leave me and my gun rights alone.

  30. wait, Marion Barry was not shot in an “assassination attempt.” he WAS shot, but Barry was wounded incidentally.

  31. We are talking about a publication that predicted a “skyrocketing” of murder of the assault weapons ban was lifted, one that memorialized the Tsarneav (Boston bombers) brothers as “gun violence victims”, and that has published more objectively debunked claims on gun issues than any publication there is.

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