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?